Re: WebPlatform Browser Support Info

On Saturday, October 19, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Doug Schepers wrote:

> Hey, folks–
>  
> On 10/19/13 5:19 AM, Tobie Langel wrote:
> > On Saturday, October 19, 2013 at 11:12 AM, PhistucK wrote:
> > > I did not see any suggestion or goal regarding one thing - would
> > > there be an API or an administration page or a form within
> > > webplatform.org (http://webplatform.org) that could be used to add
> > > data, or will the data come only from external sources? I assume
> > > the former, but unless I missed it, not having this as a goal
> > > implies the latter.
> >  
>  
>  
>  
> You're right that that's missing from the current roadmap. It's  
> something we've talked about, but haven't yet decided how to handle it.
>  
> There are basically two ways to do this:
> 1) Allow users to add support information manually in the wiki, like MDN  
> does;
>  
> 2) Require users to submit tests, which can be run to verify support by  
> any given browser.
>  
> On the one hand, it's much easier to do #1. On the other hand, it's less  
> useful, less reliable, and harder to maintain over time.
>  
> Obviously, I favor #2. Given that W3C needs to create and run tests  
> anyway, I think that's the way to go long term, especially since we also  
> have data from other test-based reliable sources. But I'm not opposed to  
> a short-term solution using approach #1.
>  
>  
> BTW, another advantage of the test-based approach (#2) is that it scales  
> to more devices, browsers, etc. Once you have a test, you can run it for  
> any environment (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, TV, set-top box, game  
> system, etc.) and collect data on that, which readers can drill into to  
> fit their need. It also means that for any given test, you're comparing  
> apples to apples, so there should be no disputed results (and no edit wars).
>  
> > I'm not sure what Doug has in mind here, but for the purpose of the
> > current conversation around the data model, users adding data via a
> > UI can be considered as just another external resource.
>  
> Yeah, for the beta, we just want to display data that is already out there.
>  
> Short term, we can let people submit pull requests via git/github to add  
> data to the repo. Medium- to long-term, we should add a UI to do so.

Can't agree with you more. Allowing contributors to write and edit tests as easily as possible is where the value is at. Hand-edited compat data is bound to become stale quickly and shouldn't be what we focus on.

--tobie

Received on Saturday, 19 October 2013 12:32:15 UTC