Re: Forums

On 5 January 2012 20:16, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/1/5 Marat Tanalin | tanalin.com <mtanalin@yandex.ru>:
>> Why are you considering existing forum-engines solely? Why couldn't W3 create such forum engine from scratch? No financing at all?
>
> For the same reason we don't have perfect test suites for every spec:
> it takes time, money, and interest, all of which are in short supply.
>
> ~TJ
>

Given the inertia and the obvious strong preference some people have
for email, it doesn't seem likely that a complete switch over to web
forums is possible, but I can understand that a lot of people nowadays
will feel more comfortable with web forums. Religious wars over the
merits of each aren't likely to go anywhere, but could some kind of
email <-> forum bridge be an option for a community-driven development
project?

The W3C is trying to open up to wider participation, but the
infrastructure side of things still seems a little opaque. If there
was a degree of co-operation from the W3C guys, providing access to
the relevant data and services, then the community could take the lead
in creating a gateway between mailing lists and the web. It seems like
there'd be a lot of people who could contribute to such a project.

You could take a staged approach, starting off with a service that
provided a read-only import of the mailing list archive into a web
forum, either an existing one or a bespoke one. Then if that was
successful, you could add in the ability to have messages originate
from the forum itself and then be posted via a W3C managed service to
the mailing list.

Does anybody know who from the W3C would be best to contact about a
project like this?

Thanks,

Jon

Received on Thursday, 5 January 2012 21:06:56 UTC