Re: New Branch Release (Was: validator/httpd/cgi-bin check,1.432.2.5,1.432.2.6)

On 3 Feb 2006, at 09:37, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * olivier Thereaux wrote:
>> I also think we could port the soap interface from HEAD to this:
>
> As far as I can tell, this new feature received almost no review so  
> far,

  Most people, developers included, won't ever notice the feature  
until it's prominently featured on validator.w3.org (and a buch of  
blogs)... But we won't put any new feature there until we get a lot  
of reviews... This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, don't you  
think?

The lack of reviews is precisely one reason why I'd like to add the  
feature to a release, tagged experimental if necessary: so that  
people can start using it. Such "APIs" are popular enough among web  
devs that I'm fairly confident we'll get, if not reviews, at least a  
few users.

> I'd rather not commit to any form of maintenance and/or stability  
> of it.

While I would be sensitive to arguments such as "the soap interface  
is broken because soandso", I have trouble agreeing with this  
viewpoint. We have a situation where the "common practice" is screen  
scraping, and we can't really tell people to us something else  
because the alternative  the unstable, experimental, proprietary XML,  
which however has been tagged "here be dragons" for so long the paint  
has worn down and no-one gives a damn any more.

So it's really not a problem of committing to the maintenance of  
something new, it's really keeping the promise of "removing these  
features altogether in favor of a full-blown SOAP interface" (sic.),  
and at last have something that we actually maintain. If adding this  
interface into 0.7.2 gets a lot of negative comments, then at least  
we'll have an opportunity to have something better in 0.8.0, no?

-- 
olivier

Received on Friday, 3 February 2006 08:14:58 UTC