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

On Monday, November 12, 2012 at 3:03 PM, Brian Kardell wrote:

>  
> On Nov 12, 2012 9:40 AM, "Marcos Caceres" <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)> wrote:
> Marco,

Marcos ;)   
>  
> 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.

Agreed.   
> 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.

Ok, yes. I've been making a lot of those too. For example:
http://specs.wacapps.net/webview/implementation/Webview.js

Also, over at the responsive images CG, we have our fair share of those (including some prollynotfills, as they have been labelled ;) ).   
> 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.

Agreed.   
> The current prefixing model which couples experimental implementations with browsers has proven problematic on all sorts of fronts.

Exactly what those problems are I am really keen to hear about.  
  
> 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.

Yep.   
> 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

There are also a ton of disadvantages/risks… specially if those things get into the wild (hence the "prolly" bit). Making sure we don't break the Web with the proliferation of prollyfills is a good thing :)  
> - the present problems are that currently most of these are very difficult to build and the community is very fractured.

i think this is mostly by design. Adding new features to the web platform is generally done because there was just no other practical way to achieve something (e.g., device APIs).    
> 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.

Me too. Thanks for the clarifications. It's good to have some common terminology.

Received on Monday, 12 November 2012 17:16:42 UTC