Re: API Docs Proposal

On 1/12/13 3:25 PM, Scott Rowe wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've updated the API project proposal 
> <http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Proposals/api_docs> and the 
> guide to creating API pages 
> <http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Creating_API_pages> with 
> guidance on converting and importing content.
> Ideally, authors of content from external sources, such as MDN, will 
> not only give their consent to have the content imported, but will 
> also continue to contribute updates to that content in its new 
> location on WPD. Maybe we can get these authors to help with this 
> project and import their own content (?). I can dream.
>
> The next step is to reach out to those authors, starting with the 
> authors of the IndexedDB 
> <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/IndexedDB> content on MDN. 
> These articles have a lot of MDN authors, a lot of Google authors, and 
> a lot of authors from all over, and it is one of the most important, 
> if one of the most reviled, APIs in the canon. The excellent 
> documentation on MDN may be credited with saving IndexedDB from 
> oblivion. So let's see if we can achieve the same level of excellence 
> on WPD - with IndexedDB and all of our APIs.
>
> Janet is the original author of the IndexedDB API along with Google's 
> Kevin Lim, and she may have some insight into how we might go about 
> requesting permission from the long list of authors.
>
> Janet, how would you recommend we proceed? Could you help me compose 
> an e-mail for the purpose and send it to the authors, or do you have 
> something else in mind?

In the short term, we can compose an email to the authors, which I can 
send, and we'll need to manually track responses.

In the long term, a few things would be helpful:
* A way for MDN users to easily declare that their content can be reused 
under WPD's terms.
* A (privacy-protected) way for MDN users to contact each other (so you 
can ask somebody to give consent).
* A way to track which contributors to a page have given consent for WPD 
reuse.

I have submitted a bug for adding fields to MDN user profiles to 
indicate consent to reuse content in WPD:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=830514

This is a fairly small change, code-wise, but also pretty low priority 
relative to other things that are needed on MDN. The quickest way to get 
it done may be for someone outside the MDN dev team to submit a patch. 
All the code for MDN is on github (https://github.com/mozilla/kuma) and 
is written in Python/Django. The MDN dev team hangs out on #mdndev on 
irc.mozilla.org, and they are quite friendly.

Intra-site messaging on MDN is high on our development priority list 
anyway, but it will take some time to spec and code, and it is still 
behind a few other things in priority. In the meanwhile, if you want to 
contact an MDN user, please work through me or another MDN admin (such 
as Eric Shepherd).

The per-page tracking isn't on the radar yet, but I'll submit a bug for 
it, and make it dependent on the profile bug.

>
>
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 10:20 AM, Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com 
> <mailto:cmills@opera.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     On 10 Jan 2013, at 17:38, Scott Rowe <scottrowe@google.com
>     <mailto:scottrowe@google.com>> wrote:
>
>     > Thanks Chris,
>     > My two bits in line...
>     >
>     >
>     > On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:48 AM, Chris Mills <cmills@w3.org
>     <mailto:cmills@w3.org>> wrote:
>     > This all sounds really good.
>     >
>     > A few questions it brought to my mind.
>     >
>     > * Are the cited APIs that we've got in progress/documentation
>     available for in any kind of priority order? Would it be worth
>     doing that? This would help me to write the document covering work
>     to do and priorities.
>     >
>     > The list of extant APIs is not prioritized - if it were, xhr
>     wouldn't be last! I have added a priority column so that we can
>     adjust and sort the order as we see fit. We started this without a
>     eye toward priority - just to evaluate the problem and scope the
>     work, but now we should establish priorities. Good call!
>
>     Coolio.
>
>     >
>     >
>     > * Are we going to cover JavaScript libraries such as jQuery,
>     Raphael, etc. in the APIs section, or would that go in JavaScript,
>     or somewhere separate? You are really just looking at HTML5 (and
>     related/similar) APIs, which is not necessarily wrong, but I
>     thought it was worth raising the question.
>     >
>     > I'm inclined to say that libraries are beyond the scope of this
>     effort. There are so many, and most are documented well enough.
>     Furthermore, the user of a library is more likely to get the
>     documentation from the library itself. I think we should focus on
>     HTML5 JavasScript APIs.
>     >
>
>     That seems reasonable.
>
>     >
>     > * On a similar note, are we going to cover 3rd party site APIs,
>     such as Twitter, Flickr, etc.? Getting someone to write something
>     concise and easy to follow about those could be a huge USP for us,
>     for example I tried using the eBay API recently and I gave up
>     because the documentation was completely unusable. But then again,
>     how many people such APIs? Is the demand there, or would it just
>     be a waste of effort? There are obviously much lower hanging fruit
>     than that to get started with.
>     >
>     > Again, and for similar reasons, I think this is out of scope.
>     However, we could consider reaching out to 3rd parties to get them
>     to publish their docs on WPD.
>
>     And again, sounds reasonable.
>
>


-- 
Janet Swisher <mailto:jREMOVEswisher@mozilla.com>
Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org>
Technical Writer/Community Steward