Attendees: Reeza Ali (Microsoft), Dan Appelquist (Samsung), Sukriti Chadha (independant), Hermina Condei (Mozilla). Daniel Ehrenberg (Igalia), Brian Kardell (Igalia), Joe Medley (Google), Chris Mills (Mozilla, Chair), Sheila Moussavi (Bocoup), Robert Nyman (Google), Kyle Pflug (Microsoft), Ali Spivak (independant)
- Date/Time: February 24 2021, 09.00 Pacific / 17.00 UK time / 18:00 Europe
- Location: Mozilla Zoom room
- Moving forward on action items (Chris)
- Web Platform Compatibility updates on MDN (Robert)
- Compat is a massive issue for developers
- Looking at top focus areas going forward (e.g. flexbox)
- Roadmap prototype (Sukriti)
- MDN Update at Mozilla (Hermina)
Chris — everyone is busy, I totally get that, but it’d be nice to start making a bit more progress on the pab GitHub issues that were recorded from action items in the past.
Ali — in the list of action items in each meeting, run through list of open GitHub issues, or perhaps just look at priorities (which would need some triaging first).
Chris — Spend half the meeting looking at previous items?
Dan — in the W3C TAG, we use a script to put issues from GitHub using the GitHub API to pull up issues, and who is assigned, etc., and generate markdown.
ACTION: CHRIS triage some issues, send mail round, ask people to update on the issues they are assigned to, and grab ones they are interested in.
Robert — From research, compat issues are by far the biggest problems for developers.
Browser vendors want to spend time fixing the biggest compat problem areas, for example flexbox (complete priority list to follow later on). Google and MS already working together on this, also speaking to Mozilla about getting involved.
The idea would be to fix the biggest issues, and then broadcast to developers that we are responding to their needs.
Also, when we reach milestones (e.g. all bugs fixed for flexbox), we could broadcast this info via blogs, RSS, MDN including MDN accounts? Personalized BCD type stuff?
Dan — One concern here; I would be slightly worried about this from the PoV of a "minority browser". Wouldn't it reinforce bias?
Would this make sense on MDN?
Hermina — we did a survey on this recently, and asked about personalized BCD; not many people said they would care about BCD. But the survey was aimed at junior developers.
Pros might be more interested
Brian — I realize it is unscientific, but a twitter poll might be an interesting data point on this ?
Hermina — I don’t think it’s unscientific (or I don’t think it matters:) but yes, definitely. A secondary data point is always a good idea. Let’s do this. We can use the MDN twitter account, unless you have other ideas?
Also, it’s a moving target — e.g. this feature is widely supported by browsers, but what does that mean? What bugs are relevant?
Robert — we are collecting all the bugs from WPT, and then working against those. It is not necessarily about 100% effectiveness, but about fixing an area to a point where it is completely usable by a developer.
Joe — the magic here is in the design. E.g. for a feature to be developed it has to add to an existing feature. Getting rid of this churn would be key.
Chris — yes, I was interested in this, exact location is in question, but yes. RSS feed, blog posts, make sure BCD is up to date.
Reeza — how often would you envisage one of these milestone articles being written? Some areas are much bigger than others.
Robert — we would have a dashboard to show progress, developers tend to want feature completeness. Would there be key milestones inside each major area? Report on each one.
Joe — saying something is supported across all browsers latest version...is that still useful? Rollout to all people will still take a while. We would need to factor this into the reporting.
Also maybe an incentive for people to upgrade their browsers. Especially interesting for folks using ESR versions.
Provide geography-aware data? E.g. it is available in 90% of browsers worldwide, but what about India, or China?
Dan — that kind of personalization would be more useful. E.g. My users are in China, what browsers do I need to support?
ACTION: Robert and others to meet to discuss more about where this should live, how to communicate this, etc. Build this into a project. Robert to set up a meeting, or maybe brainstorm in a doc.
Sukriti made a prototype ! ACTION: Chris include in process Others to give feedback
Hermina — We are having an UX designer join our team
We will be having Gregor Weber rejoin us for 3 months while Florian D is on paternity leave
We will be having another full-time writer coming on board soon
MDN now under marketing...there is interest to figure out proper place for MDN in Mozilla
ACTION: CHRIS triage some issues, send mail round, ask people to update the issues they are assigned to, and grab ones they are interested in.DONE, Chris has set up regular time on a Monday to do triaging on the content and pab repos- ACTION: ROBERT and others to meet to discuss more about where web compatibility updates should live (on MDN, Insights, etc), how to communicate this, etc. Build this into a project. Robert to set up a meeting, or maybe brainstorm in a doc. (issue #86)
ACTION: Chris to include Sukriti's web standards implementation roadmap prototype in process docs, others to give feedback.DONE, included in notes that Chris will use to write up process very soon.
Video call — March 17 2021