Re: Scope of the Extensible Web Community Group [via Extensible Web Community Group]

On Nov 12, 2012 9:40 AM, "Marcos Caceres" <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:
>
>
>
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> On Sunday, November 11, 2012 at 8:52 PM, François REMY wrote:
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> > Hi everybody! Firstly, welcome in this group. At nExtWeb, we have the
following
> > missions : Collect good samples of polyfill and get the polyfill concept
> > "known". Analyze existing polyfills and spec new browser's features
that would
> > make them easier to create. Create samples and guidelines for polyfills
writer.
> > Get the concept of "forward polyfill" known by the other W3C groups and
[...]
> >
> Thanks for the initial post. As there are only 5 of us, I figured we do
the discussion here…
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> I think a good source of polyfills is caniuse.com.
>
> Whom do you intend to target with "get the polyfill concept “known”"? Do
we have evidence that people don't know what a polyfill is? And which
people? (i.e., this should be a second level priority IMHO). For example,
Remy Sharp's article goes back to 2010, which means the term has been used
by the web dev community for at least 2 years.
>
> Also, is there are problem here? Have we found that polyfills are not
doing their job properly? (my personal motivation is just to know if I am
"doing it right", as I've written a few for various things … I've
implemented them to follow behavior and error handling in Web IDL, and I've
not found many others that do this).
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> From experience, any guidelines we produce will need to be on wiki or
github - this stuff needs to change rapidly as next best practices come and
go very quickly (i.e., this needs to be a living document from the start
and assumed it will remain so).
>
> Added some "prior art" articles to the wiki, which I thought were
relevant here:
> http://www.w3.org/community/nextweb/wiki/Prior_art
>
>
>
> --
> Marcos Caceres
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>
>
Marco,

Yes it is somewhat related to developing and promoting best practices for
polyfills...somewhat related to a group to review and critique their
fidelity as you mentioned following the Web IDL.  The fidelity of some of
them is pretty awful and that will come back to bite authors.

Much more than that though (a few things happened out of order and I think
that is making it confusing) it was intented to be a place to discuss,
encourage, promote, etc an idea that has been developing under a couple of
names, until recently the best was "forward polyfills" then in October Alex
Sexton coined the phrase "prollyfills" on Twitter.  We will link/post some
links and articles in the next hours/days.   The difference being that
pollyfills are (or at least should be) conceptually something intended to
"fill the gaps in native implementations a few browsers" of a fairly mature
standard.  The current prefixing model which couples experimental
implementations with browsers has proven problematic on all sorts of
fronts.  The idea with a prollyfill is to provide experimental/reference
implemenations for early drafts decoupled from the browsers themselves -
hopefully in a "forward compatible" way.  This has all sorts of advantages
and there are all sorts of ways to accomplish this which we will get into
as we link up - the present problems are that currently most of these are
very difficult to build and the community is very fractured.

We would like to bring them together and help build and advocate common
apis and lobby for necessary and helpful native apis where appropriate.

Looking forward to the discussions.

Brian Kardell :: @bkardell :: hitchjs.com