Re: getting more participation for development

* olivier Thereaux wrote:
>On another side of the equation, I wonder why we don't have more  
>participants helping with the development. On the user/support side,  
>I think www-validator is a real success, lots of good people acting  
>as experts, watchdogs, or providing patient help to the lost users...  
>It's a lot of time and not a grateful commitment, yet it works. How  
>could we do the same for the code? Change of infrastructure? Methods?

Well, the first question you would need to answer is what people could
do to help the development of the various QA tools. It seems the better
we can define specific tasks, the easier to find someone to do it. That
is in fact important for current contributors aswell. I do not currently
have a good idea what's needed to get a new version out of the door, for
example.

I know though what's needed for the next generation of the Validator,
it's perhaps a good time to summarize it

  * a CPAN Perl module that takes a document and some information
    about the location of an error in the document as input and
    gives back a source code excerpt

  * a CPAN Perl module that takes, as Perl SAX 2.1 filter, an HTML/
    XHTML document as input and generates an outline of the document
    and pointing out missing heading levels

  * a CPAN Perl module that takes, as Perl SAX 2.1 filter, an XML
    document as input and generates a representation of the "parse
    tree" with an option to show the attributes in the tree

  * a CPAN Perl module or changes to the existing SGML::Parser::OpenSP
    module that make its output Perl SAX 2.1 compliant to the extend
    possible

  * the HTML::Encoding module needs to be pushed to version 1.0
    which it will be once the interface is stable; this requires
    some feedback on the current interface

  * http://esw.w3.org/topic/MarkupValidator/M12N needs to be turned
    into something that can be implemented in Perl; once that's done,
    CPAN Perl modules that implement that

  * if the above is completed, S::P::O and others need to be
    integrated into the new framework

  * someone needs to resume http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML-LibXML/
    maintenance and improve RelaxNG support of the module (or we
    need to find a good replacement for it)

  * a RelaxNG Validator needs to be integreated into the framework
    mentioned above

  * we need to sort out what to do with respect to XML Schema, last
    time I checked Perl support for it was not really mature; it
    might make sense to encourage working groups to use RelaxNG...

  * we need to sort out http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~eb2m-mrt/dsdl/
    NVDL support or find a proper replacement for it

  * I need to update my Perl SAX 2.1 based AppendixC module to
    integrate with the framework above and publish it on CPAN

  * I need to update my HTML::Doctype module to comply with my
    latest ideas on this matter...

  * ...

In general, developers are likely to contribute to the project if that
helps them to get their jobs done, if they can have some confidence in
their changes (that they don't break anything), ... so I still think
our main focus should be on testing and modularization; much of the
above can be achieved without it though, it would just take some time
for the Validator to adopt certain things. It would be good to complete
the list above with things that we currently need and other information
about where we are heading, how we are organized, etc. That would, at
the very least, allow us to point interested people at something.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Monday, 27 June 2005 23:14:04 UTC