Re: Colloquial Tidbits

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 5:32 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

> > * 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.
>
> Those still seem like still valid cases, they just make those templates
> available as a platform to scale.

In these cases, though, who is most commonly doing the QA and what
methods are they using? If I'm using a default Wordpress or Drupal
theme, as a user I would probably hope to be doing as little QA as
possible in technological terms. Obviously there may be other forms of
QA. If it's a company weblog, for example, I may have to keep to
company guidelines for the content I product.

On the other hand, the people producing the templates will have to be
doing extensive QA. So CMS and CMS template designers would count as
subjects for the point suggested above. I wonder, too, about certain
kinds of complex CMS. MediaWiki for example allows a range of
structured output, go so far as to allow the embedding of raw HTML. Of
course if people are actually needing to alter the results of their
pages in terms of layout and interface even in a CMS, then those cases
would count.

> I guess what would also be interesting here is Q) what percentage
> of the Web is using a custom CMS vs … um, static pages?…

I'd like to know that too, indeed. Your point about defining a CMS is
a very good one: obviously here one of the most prominent
characteristics that I have in mind is that a CMS is anything that
abstracts the layout and interface design requirements away from the
user. But there may be other characteristics of a CMS.

Since more people are subscribed to the list than I had realised—and
welcome to all those who have signed up—I may give a few more formal
posts now outlining some of the background to the philosophy of the
CG. The principles along whose lines we're investigating are mainly
borrowed from the cognitive sciences.

> > 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.
>
> Would we be talking one on one to developers? Do you see this being
> a survey?

We could do, pursuing them ourselves, and of course developers would
be free to contribute of their own volition by mailing the CG at
public-colloquial. I'm hoping that some level of curated wiki access
would be possible too, but I'm not sure that will be possible under
the W3C's contribution framework.

> There is research in the general standardisation literature around this.
> That is, the explosion of consortia in the last century and towards the
> movement of towards informal consortia like the WHATWG

If you have references to this literature, please feel free to share
them with the list and add them to the wiki!

http://www.w3.org/community/colloquial/wiki/

Such references are precisely the kind of things that will enrich our
discourse. I've been concentrating mainly on the QA aspect, and have a
few things along those lines to share.

> standardisation is increasing, but not in traditional settings (e.g., the
> W3C). Obviously, the W3C has recognised this, which is why these
> community groups were created

Which makes it quite meta that we're investigating the very process
that gave rise to the community groups mechanism in the first place,
indeed. The W3C community groups are exciting, and I wonder how much
further the W3C could step in the same direction. These early groups
are a testbed for this, and I'm hoping that Colloquial CG will serve
as a kind of primary meta-analysis group.

> (to fold groups back into the W3C, while providing the tools that
> enables standardisation easily… such as IRC, this mailing list, the
> Website, etc.).

Would you apply the term standardisation to cross-browser polyfills?
Or what about an effort like pdf.js? (I don't have a well formed
opinion on this, so I'm not challenging your understanding; I'm really
asking!)

> > * 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.
>
> Can you give some examples of what you are thinking here? is it hardware
> or software? I guess both?

Hardware has mainly had an effect in that sites such as YouTube
wouldn't have been possible ten years ago, as far as I know. Software
has probably had a bigger effect, but I don't know. I'm sure that
things have changed, but it's an open research question for us as to
why these changes have come about.

> > Could we have predicted CMSes ten years ago?
> We might need a definition of CMS… like I implied above, I see PHP, for
> instance, as a CMS on which other CMSs can be built.

I agree, this is a very good point.

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

Received on Friday, 16 September 2011 09:07:42 UTC