Re: ReSpec 2 changes

Hi, Robin-

Thanks for the update.  I'm using v1 for the new Web Events drafts, but 
look forward to v2.

May I suggest that you add top links for Editor's Draft and Public 
Comments, as well?

Here's an example (though not using ReSpec):
   http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/DOM-Level-3-Events/html/DOM3-Events.html


Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, WebApps, and Web Events WGs


Robin Berjon wrote (on 1/20/11 10:39 AM):
> Hi all!
>
> I've been making quite a few changes to ReSpec v2 recently (as those
> who get the commit emails will have noticed). The good news is that I
> think we're close to a beta. The bad news is that if you had thrown
> caution to the wind and were already using v2, these changes will
> break your code (sorry, but alpha really means alpha).
>
> The first change concerns the plugin system, and a new feature called
> profiles. ReSpec v2 is essentially a lot of little plugins that
> process the document in order, each making its own small changes,
> very much like a Unix shell with lots of pipes (which was indeed the
> inspiration). Previously you had to list all the plugins you wanted
> in order, but that was annoying since for a given document type (say,
> a W3C specification) you pretty much always want the same. To extend
> the metaphor, profiles are like shell scripts, they capture the list
> and order of plugins to run. Right now there's just one — w3c-common
> — but there are more on the way.
>
> That's not all profiles can do. They also alleviate the
> loading-from-local-disk problem. As browser tighten up their
> security, it becomes decreasingly possible to load resources from
> file:. This is an annoyance because we don't want to force users to
> have to set up a Web server — ReSpec should just be a vanilla HTML
> document into which you add a script — but we wanted to be able to
> have dependencies such as templates. Thanks to RequireJS, profiles
> can be compiled, a process that not only makes everything neat and
> small but also folds in resources in such a way as to make them
> readily available. End users won't have to compile anything of
> course, that's for ReSpec developers (it also makes it easier for us
> to make "releases" so that all the documents in W3C that use ReSpec
> don't break at once whenever someone commits something stupid, as is
> currently the case with v1).
>
> The plugins that used external resources have been updated to make
> use of this facility. The exception is core/data-include (since its
> resources are dynamic). That means that it will probably only be
> usable in limited circumstances or when developing from a web server.
> That's probably okay though since I don't believe that it is used
> much (I've never used it myself, Shane might have a different idea
> though :).
>
> Note that this change means that v2 now works in Firefox, Opera,
> Safari, and Chrome (I haven't tested IE yet because I'm too lazy to
> watch Windows load in the VM, but I'll get around to it).
>
> Developers who don't want to waste their time compiling profiles
> every time they make a change during development can use a trick
> similar to the one in profiles/w3c-common-loader which loads the
> compiled profile when your document is from file: and the individual
> plugins and resources separately when in http:. Also, look at
> build/build-w3c-common.sh for the command that's needed to build a
> profile.
>
> Another breaking change is that I've reverted the configuration to
> rely on a global object as in v1. It's simpler, and it works better
> with profiles. The test document that shows how it works is in
> test-spec/webidl.html.
>
> The way bibliographical references are done has changed as well. They
> are now defined and loaded as RequireJS modules. This is cleaner,
> simpler, and works a lot better than the previous approach. It also
> opens the door to a more distributed way of handling references (for
> details follow the hand-waving). We need to think more about that
> though.
>
> Things to do before beta include:
>
> - a tiny amount of things to port from v1 (in case you haven't seen
> Gregg ported WebIDL which was the big one) - at least some skeletal
> documentation, I hope to get on to that next - more tests, even if
> not complete - checking that it's not completely broken on IE
>
> Thoughts, feedback, etc. welcome!
>

--

Received on Thursday, 20 January 2011 21:43:34 UTC