Re: The Extensible Web Manifesto [via Extensible Web Community Group]

Simon St.Laurent [2013-06-13T10:57]:
> On 6/13/13 9:43 AM, Karl Dubost wrote:
>> * alienating non JavaScript developers (sense of feeling powerless)
> 
> Not in my experience of the conversation - they'd love to have more markup they can deploy

yes… I would love, for example, to have a good data model for a quote markup with authors, titles attributions with cross-references in a document. I can already kind of "do that" with a combination of div/class and a JS extension (which has to be created by a JS developer). My document will work as I expect if it comes with the JS.


> without having to spend their own time on building and understanding the insides of the implementation.

Extensions, JS libraries, etc. You need people to make them. But this is old same. So let's move forward.


> If designers can grab, say, picture, plug it in, and use it with their usual toolset,


OK if I understand you, let's say something along:

<picture> 
  <pictitle></pictitle>
  <author></author>
</picture>

This is working for me. And another design elsewhere says:

<image> 
  <titre></titre>
  <droits><auteur></auteur><licence></licence></droits>
</image>


> they'd be happier than they are now pining away for features that don't rise to the expectations of the W3C or browser vendors.

They didn't have to wait indeed, how does that make the platform interoperable at the document level? It speeds up the development of a markup for my own use case, it doesn't solve the interoperability at the document level. It can be interesting socially. Helping communities to rise. It also doesn't accelerate the social agreement, it just puts it outside the usual standard organizations. Not saying it is bad. It just moves the issues elsewhere.

So there will still be mistakes, it will still be slow, but at least browsers implementers will not be blamed for it. Just the involved communities not reaching agreements.  It will give power to strong communities or companies close to some specific communities. For example, Adobe with Designers.


> It may take a while to reverse the "thou shalt only deploy HTML as blessed by the W3C" culture,

hmm not sure what you mean here. The social agreements around languages helps people to communicate. I could write this message in Japanese or French, it would not be very helpful for the discussions. Document interoperability becomes handy on a long term and distributed network. If the markup is highly dependent of some local extensions, it becomes less resilient to history and distribution. No value judgement, just choices.

> but I don't think non-JavaScript developers are going to be spending a lot of time wishing they were programmers.


It depends on the use case. A flyer which is made to exist for one year in a highly centralized fashion or an information which is made to be usable for 50 years.

back to my initial point: The length of deploying a feature is not related to the standard organizations. It is related to the scale of deployment (social agreement scope) of this feature.


What I like about the manifesto: It is more distributed.
What I think it will do: Harder to reach the social agreement.
Everything has a cost.

-- 
Karl Dubost
http://www.la-grange.net/karl/

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2013 15:39:08 UTC