In defense of the OpenAjax browser wishlist
I am actively involved in the OpenAjax Alliance and am one of the moderators for the OpenAjax Alliance wishlist.
Phil Manchester sent me email asking about why participation levels have been low on short notice. My response did not arrive to him until after his post went out.
Regarding the participation levels for the browser wishlist, actually I have been pleasantly surprised. I guess it is a matter of expectations and a matter of quality vs quantity of the participants.
When we launched the initiative, we had no grand illusions. We considered it an experiment and were unsure about the level of industry and participation we would receive in the industry. We recognized that everyone is busy and there are other forums (fora?) for making requests for future browsers. Nevertheless, we felt we had little to lose by trying, so we decided to go for it in a lightweight manner (i.e., collaborate on a wiki), where the costs to administrators and the users would be small. The pleasant surprises were: most of the major Ajax toolkits contributed to the effort, either directly (i.e., getting a login and editing the wiki) or indirectly (e.g., via phone interviews); the contributors have produced (so far) write-ups on 37 separate feature requests, which represents good technology breadth; and some (definitely not all) of the feature requests contained good depth of discussion from industry experts.
Also, other than the posts around April 13 asking for industry participation (which did indeed result in some successful recruitment), we haven't engaged in much active marketing. As I said earlier, we felt that we had good coverage among the Ajax toolkit world with the participants that we had.
We will soon (this week?) send out a second call-to-action to the industry around the browser wishlist, would might produce more participants, which is fine, but OK if we only get contributions from the people we have now. We didn't intend that the browser wishlist be a huge industry event. We just hoped that with a little effort on a wiki by some industry leaders, we could produce something that would help inform the browser vendors about what features are most important to the Ajax community for their future releases. I think we have already achieved more than we expected.
If you are an Ajax toolkit developer or an Ajax developer and you have opinions about what which new features are most important in the next generation of browsers (IE9, FF4, Safari4, Opera10), instead of taking potshots, how about participating in the effort: http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
