Re: Charter [via Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group]

Hi Marcos,

On Feb 29, 2012, at 19:01 , Marcos Caceres wrote:
> On Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> I don't think anyone would have noticed if you hadn't brought it up.
> 
> Shheesshh… you ask for a review and when you get one…  :(

Don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate your review, and you do bring up some important points later. But we're trying to break the ancient unspeakable curse that makes every spec take five years to ship. So no offence to you but stylistic considerations are not as important as anything else, and can take a back seat while we battle our lovecraftian nemesis that is spec timing.

>>> The point is that some things are identified best at features and others as use cases… I needed to detect an iPad because I needed to add touch enabled scrolling, but only for the iPad (and not for Desktop).  
>> 
>> It looks to me like you're using UA detection when you should be using feature detection (I don't know what "iScroll" does).
> http://cubiq.org/iscroll
> 
> No, Chrome may support touchEvents, but I want to know if you are "on an iPad". It doesn't help me to know if touchEvents are supported because you may be using a Desktop browser with a mouse and keyboard (hence the experience would suck for you if I gave you the iScroll enabled version).   

Without getting into a discussion of the amount of bad practices going on here, isn't the feature you want just touchscreen-compatible positioning and overflow scrolling?

>> It is taking the problem to the responsible WG. That's what we do when we see a gap. Says so in the charter.
> 
> Right, but why not go straight there? What does this group provide us that we currently don't get from the relevant groups.

"The goal of the Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group (CG) is to accelerate the adoption of the Mobile Web as a compelling *platform* for the development of modern mobile web applications."

Most groups are tasked with solving a single problem: drawing some vectors, producing some sound, interfacing with the home toaster. This group takes the platform view. It's likely that we'll spot gaps with this approach that aren't visible if you're only looking at segments.

>> Cf. previous comment about brains, knowledge, experience, etc.
> Ok, lets make sure we get the right people from each WG in there… like the Chairs from HTML, CSS, WebApps etc. (I know Artb and Chaals are already on the list!)   

Obviously everyone is welcome, but I wouldn't want to make that a prerequisite since a lot of the time it would be busy work for those people unless they're specifically interested in the minutiae of our work. Everyone here is of course encouraged to build up personal relationships in other groups in order to lubricate interactions!

>> That might be a problem when we get to Ring 2 or so. For previous rings, certainly for ring 0, I would expect that if you don't understand why developers need a given feature then you've never written a web app that works on a mobile device :)
> I don't know anything about the rings things yet, sorry.   
>> Either way, right now we don't have demands. JFDI dictates that we cross that bridge when we get there. Right now the first order of business is setting up the work-mode rules and pushing a Ring 0 document out. Problems will be dealt with as they happen.
> 
> Ok, obviously there have been discussions behind the scenes about pushing out rings or whatever… for those of us not in the know, can you articulate what you are about to JF-Do? What is this Ring 0 document? It was not in the charter and I've not seen anything on the mailing list?… bah, I never get the memo :(   

There is no cabal :) "Ring" is just a convenient name, it works nicely with what the Ringmark people have been doing, see http://rng.io/.

The notion of Ring encapsulates this:

"The CG will develop a series of specifications which combine core features from web standard specifications by the W3C and other standards bodies. Multiple levels of the specification will be published and each successive level will build on the previous one by adding new features."

It's similar to levels but across a set of specifications instead of just for one silo. If you think in terms of timing for the platform to be delivered, you are likely to splits things up into three buckets: Now, Soon, and Afterwards. That ought to give you Rings 0, 1, and 2 :)

> Ok, I hope so… but I do see a lot of ex-[Favorite Failed Mobile Industry Initiatives] participants on the CG participant list (I include myself here!). So it's natural that people will ask "not this, again?! (face-palm!)". Hope we can do it differently and learnt from previous mistakes.  

Yeah, let's make more interesting mistakes this time around :)

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Coming up soon: I'm teaching a W3C online course on Mobile Web Apps
http://www.w3devcampus.com/writing-great-web-applications-for-mobile/

Received on Wednesday, 29 February 2012 19:52:49 UTC