I was aware that you were having issues Matt. I was not aware they were
quite this dire. Can you send us / me the URI to your rawgit tree so I can
fixed to work with the current ReSpec a couple of weeks ago.
As to your suggestions.... the approach I had wanted to take was to set
complete. ReSpec added a Promise that should facilitate this. Do you
Post by Matt KingI don't know if this is the right thread for this comment ... if not, feel
free to let me know.
I am an editor and I rely on the JAWS screen reader. Because Firefox has
to be updating is accessibility tree as respect runs, it takes a really
long time to run. It is rare that I am able to start reading a branch in
rawgit in under a minute. The ARIA spec takes up to 2 minutes before I can
read it. Then, sometimes, like today, things are very broken. Today, none
of the roles, states, or property sections have headings or permalinks. I
don't know if that is due to a new respec bug or a failure of respect to
run completely, or a defect in my spec text. Today, I know it is not a
defect in my text because I haven't changed it since it last worked.
I am wondering if there is a better way for respect to work. Is there a
way to make all the respec changes without doing it on the live DOM and
then replace the entire DOM or something like that. Content hidden with
display none is left out of the AX tree, so maybe the whole DOM could be
hidden while the processing is occurring ... maybe not great for everyone,
but at least you would all have an experience that is more like mine
<smile>.
Matt King
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, June 8, 2016 2:47 AM
Subject: Re: ReSpec and how it gets used
Post by Shane McCarronComments in line
On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 2:11 PM, Markus Lanthaler
Post by Markus LanthalerPost by Tab Atkins Jr.Post by Marcos Caceresbrowser is over 2 years old now, and has been superseded by Edge).
Either kindly ask your users to switch to Edge
Well, that might be tricky for lots of users as it also requires an OS update.
Agreed. Moreover, this is not an option for many users (see below).
But this is an option for everyone who writes specs. I've never met anyone
at the w3c who is in this situation (or can't use another browser).
Post by Shane McCarronPost by Markus LanthalerPost by Tab Atkins Jr.Post by Marcos Caceresor use a more modern browser ... alternatively, please publish
the ReSpec output instead, which should work on any browser going
back to IE6.
I'm not going to ask to start supporting IE11 again but what browser
support do you aim for? Only the absolute latest version? IE11 still
seems to have a considerable market share...
We have no clear guidelines on this My inclination is to never break
faith with backward compatibility unless maintaining it forces a
reduction in primary function. I suspect we have made a mistake
removing whatever polyfill enabled IE11 support.
There was nothing removed. Just stuff got added. IE11 is not maintained,
so it breaks because it's been left behind by the Web.
Post by Shane McCarronAnd while I agree with some other
commenters that publishing static versions is a better end user
experience anyway, the reality is that many working groups are
developing specs using ReSpec, and those groups don't want to take the
time to generate static versions - in particular for their "Editor's
Draft"s. So to the extent that we want people to be able to readily
review specs as they are in development, we need to take this into
consideration.
Agree. This is a long process - but we need to work as a community to get there.
Post by Shane McCarronNote that I am not talking about the people writing the specs. I
assume they are working with relatively modern user agents. They are
typically geeks like us. But their constituents are often less
tech-savvy. The Web Payments community, for example, has A LOT of
bankers in it. Conservative organizations tend to lock down software
and only upgrade rarely, and then after acceptance testing. But they
are nonetheless members of the W3C, and should be able to review and
comment on our specs.
Sure, and again the best way to serve them is to give them generated
snapshots (even of EDs).
Post by Shane McCarronPost by Markus LanthalerPost by Tab Atkins Jr.As a reader of ReSpec'd specs, I'd highly appreciate it if more
people published the generated output instead of the sources. It
avoids the flash-of-unprocessed-content and subsequent
anchor-jumping, and it works better in the tooling infrastructure.
The thing I like most about ReSpec is that it doesn't need any
"compilation" step. It's not perfect but for most use cases it works
well enough.
Yes. It is what drew many of us to ReSpec. The recent instability has
made it a much less desirable platform. My groups have spent a lot of
time trying to resolve ReSpec introduced problems or learning new
requirements as features change. Worse yet, various changes have
broken the tool chain that enabled the automated generation of "TR"
versions of specs or otherwise made it impossible to publish without
hand-editing.
This is no different to Bikeshed or Anolis or any other piece of software.
Software breaks, things change. We patch stuff quickly and move on.
¯\_(ã)_/¯
Post by Shane McCarronAs a maintainer of ReSpec, I am appalled. As a user, I am frustrated.
As an advocate, I am finding it a hard product to recommend.
It's open source, you are free to leave, fork, use BikeShed, whatever
¯\_(ã)_/¯.
I like the improvements I've made - and sure, there was a little pain for
a tiny number of people for maybe a couple of hours, but whatever.
At least it's actually getting maintained and updated now - and it's vastly better.
A year ago, it was "stable" in the sense that it was rotting away because
no one was spending any time improving it after Robin left.
That's not stability: that's just bit rot.
Post by Shane McCarronPerhaps the solution is to make all the (named) versions available so
that document developers can choose the one that works well for them
and their users? Or identify a stable version and call that official,
then leave the "development" bleeding-edge that people can use or not.
That's what we do today. We develop in branches, which go to "develop",
which then get released into "gh-pages".
Post by Shane McCarronDo a migration to
stable periodically after substantial testing. I don't know. But
something needs to change. Right now I see the best case as people
forking ReSpec so they have something they can rely upon. I see the
worst case as them abandoning the platform. Both of these would be a
failure.
I think you are totally over dramatizing things. Little bugs are no big
deal. Most people haven't noticed that we've done like 40+ releases in the
last year.