Recent TAG impacts on APIs

Over the last week there have been a few pieces of great news and progress regarding positive TAG impact on API design. I wanted to make sure everyone in the group was aware of them.

- I just finished a call with the web audio group going over the remaining TAG issues, namely layering, promises, constructors, and subclassing. The minutes are at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-audio/2014AprJun/0027.html. I think the discussion was very productive and there's general appreciation for the points being made and agreement to take on the relevant work.

- Relatedly, we talked about how proper subclassing support in the platform is still largely a work in progress---no web APIs support it right now, and it's very tricky. WebIDL doesn't have much support for the concept. I think this is an action area for TAG work that I would be happy to spearhead, given my experience with designing subclassable primitives with ES6 promises. The web audio group will likely be our first consumer of this design advice, as they urgently want subclassing to work in order for users to be able to create custom audio nodes without having to reimplement all of the complex audio algorithms from scratch.

  I've started a repo at https://github.com/w3ctag/subclassable-apis-guide to capture some of my thoughts on the kind of stuff that needs documentation and discussion.

- I had a brief conversation with Doug Schepers about the possibility of giving an overview of topics like promises, constructors, and possibly subclassing to a larger group of API owners and working group heads at the W3C. He seems to have a good lead on a platform for disseminating the kind of architectural knowledge the TAG is well-suited for.

- Penultimately, I'd like to note that our design principles repo, even in its super-nascent form, had a positive impact on the Web Animations discussion about milliseconds versus seconds: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2014AprJun/0014.html It seems to me this repo has the potential for a lot of good and I look forward to developing it further.

- Also of note, the web animations spec editor asked for further feedback, so I am hopeful we can continue to work to deliver that feedback based on Sergey's great work so far.

Received on Thursday, 17 April 2014 17:28:41 UTC