Re: Howto spec

On May 23, 2012, at 20:30 , Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Dimitri Glazkov <dglazkov@chromium.org> wrote:
>> Should I be concerned about what seems to be a lively competition
>> between ReSpec and Anolis. Do we need this tussle? Can we not just
>> decide which tool to use?
> 
> It's a tradeoff:
> 
> ReSpec.js pro:
> 
> * No setup costs
> 
> ReSpec.js con:
> 
> * Loads slower because of script. You get a flash of unstyled content.
> User experience suffers.

Right. ReSpec is optimised for editors more than for users, at the cost of all the processing taking place at runtime. The performance is made worse by the fact that a 300K biblio database (yay!) is loaded over the wire. The FOUC is much worsened by the fact that an older browser (I forget which, maybe FX3?) had abysmal performance when many text nodes were being manipulated, the fix for which was to set display: none on body before running and reverting it afterwards (re-yay!). Both of those issues are going away very soon though.

If you want smoother UX you can generate a static output. This is currently harder than it should be; if there's interest I can hack something out.

Overall there's no competition though, I doubt that there can be one tool for everyone's tastes. I also think that it's good to have a Web-based tool and a more traditional Python one, it helps us keep in mind what we need to improve with the Web.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2012 08:40:03 UTC