[whatwg] WHATWG on Google+

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Nov 2011, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>> On 11/21/11 3:39 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>> > If you can tell me which pieces those are, I can see what I can do
>> > about updating the annotations mechanism to make those checkins easier
>> > to filter out.
>>
>> That's the problem.  The set of changes that matter to a particular
>> person is not static...
>>
>> Up until about 6 months ago, for example, I would probably have been
>> interested in any change involving browsing contexts; at this point I'm
>> probably not.
>
> If the number of people who would benefit from explicit annotations is
> small, I would be happy to add explicit annotations for those people.
> Since I have to do those by hand anyway, I'm happy to change the list as
> time goes on.
>
> Another option is for someone (possibly me) to create a system whereby
> people can subscribe to specific portions of the specification, and for a
> tool to detect when a diff affects that portion and e-mail them. I'm not
> exactly sure how to make that work, but if it's something people are
> interested in, we could figure something out.
>
>
>> > Have you been able to make use of the existing annotations at all?
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by "existing annotations" here.  Something
>> separate from the changeset commit comments for the spec?
>
> Each checkin starts with an annotation saying which conformance classes
> the checkin affects, e.g.:
>
>   [html5] r5891 - [c] (0) Continue the conformance chain for inline
>   <script> elements. Somehow I'd [...]
>
> "c" means "conformance checkers"
>
>
>   [html5] r6813 - [e] (0) Forgot to remove this now false note
>
> "e" means "editorial"
>
>
>   [html5] r6829 - [acgiowt] (1) extend timezone format to also allow
>   omitting the colon
>
> "a" means "authors", "g" means "gecko", "i" means "internet explorer", "o"
> means "opera", "w" means "webkit", and "t" means "tools".
>
>
> The Tracker page converts these to icons:
>
>   http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker
>
> By looking only at those changes with the Mozilla icon, you can easily
> ignore things that affect only conformance checkers or authors. The
> tracker explicitly has a way to completely hide purely editorial changes.
>
> (The number in brackets in the checkins is supposed to indicate how stable
> the relevant section of the spec is, and controls how red the lines are in
> the tracker; the theory being that changes to stable sections are more
> critical than changes to new sections.)

Oh, that's cool. I wasn't aware of this.

However, I don't think this rough classification actually helps me
much to identify what I want to look at. If at least the area of
change is mentioned in your descriptive text, that would help me much
more. For me "media" (or "video") and "webvtt" are of particular
interest. I am particularly annoyed when I read things like "Forgot to
remove this now false note" but don't know which spec area it applies
to - if it's in "media" I will check no matter whether [e] or [c], if
it's in - say - "tables", I likely won't care.

Just my 2c worth. I know how hard it is to write informative commit messages!!

Cheers,
Silvia.