Feb Doc Sprint write up

Our company requires (or strongly encourages) trip reports, so this was the little write up I did for the Doc Sprint on Feb 23. (feel free to correct any errors in names, quantites, or locations) 

Photos of the event are here: https://plus.google.com/photos/109613786797070472511/albums/5848405456539154465

Webplatform.org Doc Sprint 

The Webplatform.org Doc Sprint held at Adobe's San Francisco headquarters got off to a slow start. With about 25 people showing up on a beautiful sunny Saturday morning was probably a feat in itself. A number of the participants had done doc sprints before, so were there to continue work. 

Julee Burdekin, Sr. content strategist at Adobe led the discussion of what webplatform.org is, how it works, and how to get in and edit. Julee, along with Scott Rowe of Google and Doug Schepers of W3C walked the group through a list of CSS content that needed work. Scott and Julee explained of how to find issues of things to work on, how to edit using the editing UI. 

Scott conducted an exercise with tasks printed out on slips of paper which he gave to newbies. He instructed the folks who'd already done some editing on webplatform.org to mentor the newbies. After about 20-30 minutes of working through these tasks we came back as a group to share what we'd found, and the ease or difficulties we encountered. One resounding complaint was that tasks that were tagged as "if you've only got 5 minutes" turned out to take much longer, especially if you're not a member or logged on, or aren't familiar with the site and tools. 

After a morning of Q&A on getting the system, and yourself up and running, we broke for lunch. This kind of took the wind out of the group, as lunch and socializing ate up another hour or so. After lunch, most people started to dig in. As the afternoon wore on, some people packed up, and headed out. 

I found the live code feature (code.webplatform.org) really intriguing, as it gives the ability to show code, than actually demo it in the docs, something Microsoft is currently missing. The code underneath is dabblet.com, a testing site where you can try out code. In converting an existing demo to show live, I worked with Lea Verou of the W3C on getting it working in code.webplatform.com. 
As an alpha, not everything worked correctly the first time. 

The code.webplatform.org interface provides three tabs for HTML, CSS, and Javascript. To make a demo you divide up your code into these three component parts. You need to select and paste new code over the default demo that's already in the page. The boilerplate tags such as  <body>, <style>, and <script> are understood, so you leave them out. If you have an "onload" event in the body, or a DOMContentLoaded event in the javascript, leave that out as well as the system already does a DOMContentLoaded event for the javascript. Interestingly, to title the demo, you need to put a comment in the first line of the CSS tab. For example, /* arcTo example */  in the first line is essentially the same as <title>arcTo example</title> in the <head> section. 

I ran into one snag when creating examples, which was that my code was working fine, but it wasn't automatically running when the demo was opened. In some cases the display showed, then quickly disappeared. In working with Lea on this, we came up initially with no answers. However, we narrowed it down to a problem running IE 10 through a remote desktop connection. I confirmed that the code worked fine when I got back to the office. Oddly, it worked ok remotely in FireFox. 

The day wrapped up (or ran down) as people left. One woman apologized for leaving a little early, but said she was going to continue at home now that she understood how to edit on webplatform.org. This sentiment was echoed by several others. The actual net amount of work that was done in the session might have been less than what was expected. Hopefully more work will be done in the future now that people were introduced to webplatform.org and learned the basics.

Jay Munro  Content Developer 2 Internet Explorer 

Received on Saturday, 2 March 2013 00:21:53 UTC