Colloquial Tidbits

Now that everybody should be subscribed to the lists, I'd like to
check that everybody is receiving email properly and start things
moving along.

There are lots of interesting things I'd like to work on, and I hope
that everybody else will add to the pool. My general plan for going
forward at the moment is to outline some of the ideas on the lists and
wiki, and when we've settled some basics recruit some more people from
neighbouring communities such as the HTML lists and so on.

Just a few ideas to be thinking about at this stage:

* Quality assurance scenarios. How do people actually check their
websites? The scope here is people who write the HTML / CSS /
JavaScript themselves, so people who are pumping material through a
CMS don't count. Will probably involve spending lots of time in the
DOM inspector. I'm constantly having to draw in boxes to check why the
box model isn't quite working as I think it should be.

* Cross browser polyfills. Ways of making the future web work through
scripting, usually. I even made a seamless iframe one, by making the
old browsers (which is to say, current browsers, since seamless
iframes aren't supported anywhere yet) render a button instead. Is
standardisation taking a back seat now that we have more powerful
mechanisms in which to build new technologies? You don't have to make
a standards organisation to create CoffeeScript for example; but
compare Dash. Er, Dart...

* Fashions. The web ten years ago was very different to the web now
not just because it had fewer users, but also because the technologies
have changed dramatically. A lot of content now gets pushed through
CMSes. Can we predict whether this trend will rise or fall over the
next ten years? What trends might be coming up in the next ten years
with respect to content? Could we have predicted CMSes ten years ago?

Material sent to public-colloquial-contrib automatically gets license
cleared so that we can use it on the wiki and in any specifications
that we produce, though I'm not exactly sure what kind of
specifications a descriptivist research group would be making.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2011 20:57:33 UTC