MDN/Archives/Projects/Development/CompatibilityTables

Web compatibility tables (WCT) are one of the key feature of MDN. It allows users to know more about the reliability of any web standard features and to ease the use of web technologies. Currently, the data are gather and maintain "by hand". Thanks to our awesome community we have some good data. However, this is hardly sustainable as the number of technologies is growing as well a the complexity of the implementation. We start to face some difficulties to stay up to date and to provide and improved content around those data.

Goals

This project intend to cover the following goals:

• Improving the quality and display of data
  • Avoid misleading users with inaccurate data.
    • NOTE: This is our primary concern as misleading users is the worst thing we could do on MDN (as a bad side effect it could induce distrust of Mozilla).
  • Make sure our data are coherent all across MDN.
    • NOTE: This is our secondary most important concern for the same reason as the first one (even if the side effect could only affect MDN rather than Mozilla).
  • Allow compatibility data to scale technically with a proper data schema
  • Allow simple and complex compatibility data to be properly display in a responsive environment
• Easing data contribution
  • Allow (and automate) massive data contribution
  • Allow easier single in-site contribution
    • NOTE: This is our third most important concern as it impacts contributors right now. By easing the contribution we ensure to improve both the quality and quantity of data, but we also pleased our contributors which ultimately contribute to the good reputation of both MDN and Mozilla.
• Easing access to data
  • Provide a way to allow third party tools or web sites to use our data
  • Allow importation of data from third party resources
• Allowing the reuse of data within MDN
  • Make data reachable through KumaScript
  • Make data usable for filtering research

NOTE: This project is action driven rather than time driven. It means that we do whatever is needed to reach our goals, whatever the time it requires. However, in order to not to be swamped into an endless project, we try to cut into small actionable steps that allows to measure progress as often as possible.

Critical Path

To ensure the success of the project, the following schema detailed its critical path in term of actions.

Critical path

It can be roughly summarized as follow:

1. Retrieve the most important needs (requirement and use cases) regarding the data
2. Handle a data storage
3. Build how to get data
4. Build how to expose data

Get Involved

Any one who wish to get involved with this project is welcome. This page will provide information about the project and its progress. Everything is discuss directly on the dev-mdn mailing list. Schedule and progress are summarized on the the mdn mailing list.

Renoir is the resource leading that project, feel free to contact him for any question. He's available, for sure, on IRC almost all the time under the nickname renoirb and follows typical work hours within the America/New_York time-zone.

Who's in charge?

Responsibilities for the project are define through the following RASCI matrix:

• MDN — RACI — Compat Data (PDF)

Current progress

Monthly Checking meeting

• Meeting minutes and notes
• Archives
  • 2014-2015 Meeting minutes and notes (migrated from Etherpad)
  • End of year 2014 status update (migrated from Etherpad)
  • 07/03/2014
  • 08/07/2014

In progress

• Follow up of the project on Bugzilla:
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=compat-data
• Defining the data schema to use
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=996570
  • https://github.com/jwhitlock/web-platform-compat
• UX work notes (migrated from Etherpad)
• Start building the data hosting service
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1050458

Next step

• Release a first alpha

Done

• Kick off
• Sort out initial feedback
• Functional requirements regarding data
• Technical kick off (migrated from Etherpad)
• UX kick off (migrated from Etherpad)

Bugzilla status

Main tracking bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=compat-data

No results.

0 Total; 0 Open (0%); 0 Resolved (0%); 0 Verified (0%);

Useful resources

• Discussion on the WPF ML about using MDN compatibility data
  • http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webplatform/2014Jan/0017.html
• Proposal by Daniel Buchner to automated gathering compatibility data
  • See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.mdn.drivers/qS7InnkaNYY
  • and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=946413
• Draft for a data schema by Sheppy, Jean-Yves and Jeremie
  • MDN Compat schema
• Draft for a standard data schema by the webplatfrom.org project
  • http://webplatform.github.io/browser-compat-model/
• Mockup of a browser support info ribbon that could go at the top of MDN pages, by Chris Mills
  • http://people.mozilla.org/~cmills/browser-compat-ribbon/

Possible third party resources

data source

• http://www.browserscope.org
• http://caniuse.com
• http://mobilehtml5.org
• http://html5test.com
• Google Analytics stats (this need further investigation)
• http://www.quirksmode.org/compatibility.html
• http://status.modern.ie/ & http://status.modern.ie/features (JSON Feed)
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MicrosoftEdge/Status/production/app/static/ie-status.json
• Google Chrome SpreadSheet

tests suite

• http://modernizr.com
• https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests
• https://github.com/operasoftware/presto-testo (this is raw material, but quite interesting)