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• Why I became a HTML5 co-editor

  1er janvier 2014, par silvia

  A few weeks ago, I had the honor to be appointed as part of the editorial team of the W3C HTML5 specification.

  Since Ian Hickson had recently decided to focus solely on editing the WHATWG HTML living standard specification, the W3C started looking for other editors to take the existing HTML5 specification to REC level. REC level is what other standards organizations call a “ratified standard”.

  But what does REC level really mean for HTML ?

  In my probably somewhat subjective view, recommendation level means that a snapshot is taken of the continuously evolving HTML spec, which has a comprehensive feature set, that is implemented in a cross-browser interoperable way, has a complete test set for the features, and has received wide review. The latter implies that other groups in the W3C have had a chance to look at the specification and make sure it satisfies their basic requirements, which include e.g. applicability to all users (accessibility, internationalization), platforms, and devices (mobile, TV).

  Basically it means that we stop for a “moment”, take a deep breath, polish the feature set that we’ve been working on this far, and make sure we all agree on it, before we get back to changing the world with cool new stuff. In a software project we would call it a release branch with feature freeze.

  Now, as productive as that may sound for software – it’s not actually that exciting for a specification. Firstly, the most exciting things happen when writing new features. Secondly, development of browsers doesn’t just magically stop to get the release (REC) happening. And lastly, if we’ve done our specification work well, there should be only little work to do. Basically, it’s the unthankful work of tidying up that we’re looking at here.

  So, why am I doing it ? I am not doing this for money – I’m currently part-time contracting to Google’s accessibility team working on video accessibility and this editor work is not covered by my contract. It wasn’t possible to reconcile polishing work on a specification with the goals of my contract, which include pushing new accessibility features forward. Therefore, when invited, I decided to offer my spare time to the W3C.

  I’m giving this time under the condition that I’d only be looking at accessibility and video related sections. This is where my interest and expertise lie, and where I’m passionate to get things right. I want to make sure that we create accessibility features that will be implemented and that we polish existing video features. I want to make sure we don’t digress from implementations which continue to get updated and may follow the WHATWG spec or HTML.next or other needs.

  I am not yet completely sure what the editorship will entail. Will we look at tests, too ? Will we get involved in HTML.next ? This far we’ve been preparing for our work by setting up adequate version control repositories, building a spec creation process, discussing how to bridge to the WHATWG commits, and analysing the long list of bugs to see how to cope with them. There’s plenty of actual text editing work ahead and the team is shaping up well ! I look forward to the new experiences.

• Presentation of Piwik’s collaborative translations platform : oTrance [Interview]

  19 avril 2013, par matt — Community, translation

  Piwik enables domain administrators, hobbyists, power users, personal website builders and everyone in between to access enormous amounts of data for website analytics. To support all those users, Piwik needs to be available in a number of different languages. From the start, we made internationalization (i18n) part of Piwik’s DNA. There are now dozens active volunteers who help make sure each language is well represented in the latest official release of Piwik. As of now, Piwik is available in 48 languages.

  Recently a new tool became available that makes the translation of Piwik much easier. The software we are using is an open source platform called oTrance. It has made our translation architecture more robust, and it allows us to expedite the timely delivery of high quality and up-to-date translations to the thousands of people who rely on Piwik every day.

  We’ve met with oTrance creator and lead developer Daniel Schlichtholz who answered a few questions for us.

  1. What is oTrance ?
  2. What sets oTrance apart from the other ways to manage translations ?
  3. Now that oTranCe 1.0 is out, what will you be working on next ?

  What is oTrance ?

  oTranCe is the short form of “Online Translation Center”. It was born because I needed a translation platform for my project MySQLDumper.

  Many languages have been added by the community and manual maintenance became more and more time consuming. I wanted to change that. So I searched for an existing platform I could use and tested a lot of approaches. To put a long story short : none of the given solutions satisfied my needs.

  From the view of a translator maintaining a language should be as easy as possible. In most cases they have to install a program on their local machine or the workflow was too difficult. A translator doesn’t want to struggle with technical things ; he just wants to translate the phrases and wants to know the progress.

  That’s the main goal we want to reach : to make the translation process as easy as possible.

  What sets oTrance apart from the other ways to manage translations ?

  Ease of use is one advantage of oTranCe compared to other solutions. Another advantage is that project administrators can install oTranCe on their own server – so nobody is dependant of a third party provider.

  We love to get feedback from other users. User feedback influences the way oTranCe is developed. We believe that this way oTranCe satisfies the requirements of the real world.

  We also have extensive user documentation, in our “Working with oTranCe” wiki. We try to document use cases in an understandable way. We don’t write down marketing buzz words, but try to explain the use from the view of the user/administrator.

  Now that oTranCe 1.0 is out, what will you be working on next ?

  The language files can be exported to version control and oTranCe can commit changes to the target repository. Currently we support export to Subversion, and we are working on a Git export adapter, which will be released soon.

  Another issue we are trying to solve is the context problem. When your project uses many different phrases the translator often doesn’t know in which context the current phrase is used. Version 1.1.0 (not released yet, but you can grab the latest developer version from GitHub) introduces the oTranCe-connector. The idea behind it : a small plug in grabs the used phrases/keys on the current page, and on click this list is submitted to oTranCe, where the translator can edit the words. This way the translator knows in which context these phrases are used. I wrote a small plug in for OXID eShop. Since it is really easy to implement, my hope is that other plug ins for other applications will be added by the community.

  Matthieu : Congratulations Daniel for having created such an awesome Translation Platform. At Piwik we are really thankful for oTranCe, which has resulted in much better translation process, and happier translators. Keep up the good work !

  If you are a Piwik user, and if you want to participate in translating Piwik, please sign up for an account on oTrance and become part of the team making Piwik available in more languages across the world.

• Analytics for ePortfolios, Mahara hui conference

  20 mars 2014, par Matthieu Aubry — Community, Meta

  I was privileged to present at the Mahara Hui conference in Wellington, New Zealand.

  Here are the slides of my presentation “Analytics for ePortfolios” :

  Summary : by using an analytics tool that integrates well with Mahara, such as Piwik, Mahara users can benefit from a multitude of insightful analytics reports.

  Learn more

  Mahara is a web application to build your electronic portfolio. You can create journals, upload files, embed social media resources from the web and collaborate with other users in groups. Mahara is a popular open source project built by a passionate community, and used in universities, schools and companies all over the world.

  Mahara Hui is the first kiwi conference on Mahara, the open source ePortfolio system, in New Zealand. This 2-day conference was held at Te Papa in Wellington from 19 to 20 March 2014 (schedule)

  Next steps

  I’m excited to join the Mahara team at the Mahara Hui Hackfest organised today at Catalyst IT offices. We will brainstorm how to integrate Piwik beautifully within Mahara, and how to ultimately provide students and employees useful analytics on all the content they create !