- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:11:11 +0100
- To: marcosc@opera.com
- Cc: public-webapps WG <public-webapps@w3.org>
On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 5:05 PM, Marcos Caceres <marcosc@opera.com> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 8:48 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote: >> Hello, >> >> I understand from http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-widgets-20091029/ that >> this is the place to direct my feedback on the widget packaging spec, >> and that I have missed the Last Call deadline by one day. I hope you >> will consider my plea anyway, since it is based on evaluation of an >> implementation I only discovered last night. See below for an issue I >> tried to raise with the implementor. >> >> It seems W3C Widget zip packages unload a mess of several files in the >> current working directory when unzipped. >> >> This is unfortunate and I urge you to consider a design that allows >> things to be kept in a single subdirectory. >> >> 1. the dominant convention in modern software development is that you >> can safely unwrap a .zip or .tar.gz in the current working directory, >> in the expectation that you'll find only a sensibly named >> subdirectory. Those who violate this expectation are often seen as >> making a basic beginners mistake. Encoding such a 'mistake' in a W3C >> REC both looks bad, and encourages bad practice. >> >> 2. by risking a mixup between pre-existing files and those from the >> archive file, we introduce the risk of confusion and inclarity, making >> widgets ever slightly harder to learn from. And or those who do try to >> learn from others works, we reward them by making a mess of their >> filetree. Assuming 1000 new developers decide each day to explore W3C >> Widget technology and learn by example, I expect 900+ of them will >> come with the reasonable assumption that a zip file can be safely >> unpacked in a directory that has already got other stuff in it >> (including possibly files with common names like index.html). Mixing >> up files will be annoying; accidentally overwriting files will be >> infuriating.... >> >> 3. Are we confident that all unzip tools will ask nicely before >> overwriting existing files? A quick test on my machine at least gave >> me a warning. >> >> eg. >> TellyClub:~ danbri$ mkdir w3ctest >> TellyClub:~ danbri$ cd w3ctest/ >> TellyClub:w3ctest danbri$ echo '<html6>my original valuable html >> document</>' > index.html >> TellyClub:w3ctest danbri$ curl -Os http://berjon.com/tmp/a-widget.wgt >> TellyClub:w3ctest danbri$ unzip a-widget.wgt >> Archive: a-widget.wgt >> inflating: config.xml >> inflating: icon.svg >> creating: img/ >> inflating: img/me.jpg >> replace index.html? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: >> >> >> Thanks for considering my request. >> > > I spoke to Dan about the above offline, we feel that adding the > following non-normative authoring guideline into the specification > would be sufficient to address Dan's concerns: Just a quick note to confirm that this would satisfy my concern for now. I hope a subdirectory based approach can be specified in the future, but for now I'm happy with this resolution. Also to ack Art's response which arrived as I type this. Thanks both. May 2010 not be like 1984 :) cheers, Dan
Received on Friday, 20 November 2009 16:11:44 UTC