Re: Compat Table Progress

Congratulations!

How do we keep the two synchronize going forward?
I am changing the compatibility tables over at MDN right now for <iframe>,
for example (but really). What will be the frequency at which the data is
re-imported?


☆*PhistucK*


On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Jen Simmons <jen@jensimmons.com> wrote:

> Great news!
>
> Jen Simmons
> designer, consultant and speaker
> host of The Web Ahead
> jensimmons.com
> 5by5.tv/webahead
> twitter: jensimmons <http://twitter.com/jensimmons>
>
>
>
> 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 Even though MDN's data is not perfect (it's often out of date, and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
>>
>>
>