Re: Compat Table Progress

Great news!

Jen Simmons
designer, consultant and speaker
host of The Web Ahead
jensimmons.com
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On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 11:58 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi, folks-
>
> I'm very pleased to announce that we've passed a major milestone in the
> compatibility table project!
>
> This week, Renoir converted the MDN compatibility table information into a
> normalized JSON file.
>
> As I understand it, he used Frozenice's MDN-to-JSON crawler script [2] to
> do the first pass, then wrote another script [3] to normalize the data
> incrementally (in occasional consultation with me). This was
> time-consuming, since MDN's data was rather inconsistent both in formatting
> and in how the results were reported, as well as having quite a bit of
> ambiguity. He recorded some of these anomalies [4], and preserved them in a
> "notes" entry for that browser/feature, so we wouldn't lose the data, while
> making his best guess for the normalized version of the data; we hope that
> this cleaned-up data will be useful for the MDN project's own compat-data
> project, and that we can work together with MDN to make the data even
> better over time.
>
> Even though MDN's data is not perfect (it's often out of date, and
> reporting is spotty on some browsers for some features), it's a great
> starting point for our own compat data for a few reasons:
> * MDN was generous enough to share the data with us!
> * it's organized in a way very similar to ours (no coincidence, really,
> since we used MDN as inspiration for how we organized WPD)
> * it often goes into great detail about sub-features
> * it has the widest coverage for older features (CanIUse mostly focuses on
> newer stuff)
> * it was available via their API (QuirksMode's data is still locked up in
> HTML tables, and we'll need to help PPK convert that)
>
> We decided to structure the data to follow the JSON data model (and result
> coding [5] from CanIUse, for a couple of reasons:
> * it's a proven model, and we didn't have to finalize the details of our
> own more comprehensive data model
> * it was simple to convert to that format
> * it will help us integrate the CanIUse data (which is one of our next
> steps)
> * it is largely compatible with the existing MediaWiki extension that I
> wrote all those months ago.
>
> As you know, reporting compatibility information is one of the major
> roadblocks to our announcement of the CSS properties, and importing the MDN
> was definitely one of the more challenging and time-consuming parts; the
> enormity of the task scared away more than one contributor! So I have to
> give a huge shout-out to Frozenice for writing the original script, Pat
> Tressel for helping out in the discussions and framing the problem, and
> especially Renoir for diligently normalizing the data and producing the
> final output!
>
> The next step is to finalize the MediaWiki extension to push the data into
> our pages, which I hope will not be hard.
>
> (BTW, both Frozenice and Renoir wrote the scripts in NodeJS, which is what
> we're going to try to write most of our future code in.)
>
>
> [1] https://raw.github.com/webplatform/mdn-compat-
> importer/internal-js-object/data/compat-mdn.json
> [2] https://github.com/webplatform/mdn-compat-importer
> [3] https://github.com/webplatform/mdn-compat-importer/blob/internal-js-
> object/lib/EntityConverter.js
> [4] https://github.com/webplatform/mdn-compat-importer/blob/
> 1d633d4d42cf622c30981484b182c4e7aa507262/data/compat-anomalies.txt
> [5] https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/blob/master/Contributing.md
>
> Regards-
> -Doug
>
>