On 11/8/11 8:50 AM, ext Robin Berjon wrote:
On Nov 7, 2011, at 20:52 , Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
One theme that was easy to observe at the conference was the pondering
around who those mysterious consumers of what we do are, how to reach
them, and how to reason about them. I heard people speak of Web
Authors and Web Developers and making various distinctions about them.
I heard some folks of arguing that this audience of ours prefers
markup over scripts, and when faced with concrete examples of the
opposite, retort that those are just some script library folk, not the
majority.
It made me think that perhaps pure democracy as means of assessing the
needs of such a vast, enormously uneven (in terms of skill and
influence) audience is severely flawed. And moreover, it's likely
responsible for the sad situation we're in today, where markup is a
rare craft, cutting-edge Web apps are nothing but bootstraps for
loading script, and the actual Web influencers (like jQuery engineers)
actually have to send designated ambassadors into our realm to try and
reason with us.
(If you think some specific spec(s) is especially problematic, I'd like
to know which one(s).)
The problem of getting input from our audience is a long-standing one. There
are clearly way too many web developers out there for us to ask them all, which
means getting feedback requires mediation. In turn, mediation has all sorts of
problems, including the usual clique and confirmation biases that can kick in
despite the best of intentions.
We could also create a new list (e.g. public-webapps-devs) for Q&A type
discussions .
During the "jQuery Standards Group" breakout, we agreed to kick off the Script Library
Community Group (http://www.w3.org/community/scriptlib/) which could serve as a venue for
developers to come provide their ideas and feedback without having to follow a fire hose mailing
list such as this one or being crushed to bits by untactful folks. I think it would also make sense
for spec writers to send "What do you prefer?" questions there.
There aren't many people on the group yet since it's so fresh, but I think that
we can solve that rather quickly. Spreading the word as to its existence is
certainly recommended :)
I agree Education & Outreach type groups may be helpful so thanks for
mentioning this Robin.
We may create tutorial type information (e.g. separate Primer docs) for
any of our specs . All we need are volunteers ;-).
-AB
