Fwd: [web-animations] Naming of timing groups in the API

Meant to send this to the whole list.  And to be clear, this ends up being
a vote for "ParallelGroup" for clarity's sake.

Best regards,

- Kris

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kristopher Giesing <kris.giesing@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 11:41 PM
Subject: Re: [web-animations] Naming of timing groups in the API
To: Brian Birtles <bbirtles@mozilla.com>


Hm. "Sync" doesn't really suggest parallelism to me; in fact, it suggests
the opposite, in the sense that synchronous APIs generally execute
sequentially when called, while async APIs generally execute in parallel.
 But I don't particularly like the obvious counter suggestion of
"AsyncGroup" because all animations are in a sense asynchronous (to the
caller, if not necessarily each other).

The best word I can come up with (other than "parallel") is "concurrent",
but that's even longer.  "Tandem" (in the sense of "working together") is
attractive to me but in some idiomatic uses it means the opposite of what
we want ("ordered front to back").

It's a puzzler.

I understand the desire for brevity, but in this case, I'd vote for
clarity.  People who want brevity can always create their own abbreviations
pretty trivially. I also wonder in practice how often this will be typed
out, rather than copied (for SVG) or wrapped (in code).

Best regards,

- Kris


On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 5:17 PM, Brian Birtles <bbirtles@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I thought I'd open up this thread again.[1] Some people would like to
> write code samples for the Web Animations API and since we know ParGroup
> and SeqGroup are going to change names at some point, it would be good to
> try to fix them now or at least get them a little closer to their final
> naming before littering the Internet with incorrect naming like we did with
> flexbox.
>
> Here's my latest suggestion:
>
>   SyncGroup and SequenceGroup
>
> Some explanation:
>
> - SyncGroup is the old ParGroup. There was some concern about "Parallel"
> being unclear. Also, SyncGroup is four characters (~30%) shorter to type
> than "ParallelGroup".
>
> - SequenceGroup is the old SeqGroup. It's longer, but the savings from
> SyncGroup go some way to compensating for this. It's more clear. 'Sequence'
> alone is probably too generic since it already has other meanings (e.g. an
> array-like thing in WebIDL).
>
> - I suggest when we map these to SVG we could use <sync> and <sequence>
> instead of <par> and <seq>. This is both to make life easier for authors
> working with markup and script and because 'par' and 'seq' are not obvious
> in meaning. Making the mapping to SVG straightforward is also why I've
> steered away from any name using 'set' or just 'group' since SVG already
> has <set> and <g> (=group).
>
> - We *could* make SequenceGroup a subclass of SyncGroup but I think that
> can be a separate discussion and I'm not yet persuaded it's a good idea.
>
> So in practice, code might look like:
>
> document.timeline.play(
>     new SyncGroup([
>       new SequenceGroup([new Animation(...), new Animation(...)]),
>       new Animation(...)
>     ])
>   );
>
> And SVG code:
>
>   <sync>
>     <sequence>
>       <animate ... />
>       <animate ... />
>     </sequence>
>     <animate ... />
>   </sync>
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Brian
>
> [1] The original thread is here for anyone who lost it:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2013JulSep/0115.html
>
>