Aspects of AJAX: OpenAjax Call-to-Action to Ajax Developers for Browser Wishlist

The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki for this initiative (http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki). The main purpose of the initiative is to inform the browser vendors about what future features are most important to the Ajax community and why. So far, the alliance has interviewed roughly a dozen industry leaders, including representatives from the ASP.NET AJAX, Dojo, Ext JS, Douglas Crockford of JSON fame, jQuery, Spry, and XAP, and recently held a townhall discussion on the feature request list among its members. The members have concluded that the wishlist (~25 items) is ready for public comments.

The alliance is now issuing a call-to-action to Ajax developers to participate in this initiative, which is open to both OpenAjax Alliance members and to non-members. The alliance especially would like participation from Ajax toolkit developers and leading web developers with expertise in using open browser technologies to achieve rich user experiences. To join the effort, create a wiki login for yourself by following the instructions on the wiki home page (http://www.openajax.org/runtime/wiki). After you have a login, you can then add new feature requests or comment on existing feature requests as you see fit. The initiative operates on an honor-system basis.

The moderators have attempted to make it possible that the community can add comments and vote on particular feature requests without large time commitments. For example, it is possible to simply vote for your favorite feature requests by adding a single row to a wiki table. The alliance’s wiki uses the same markup language as wikipedia.

Here is the timeline:

• April - Phase I review, where participants not only add comments, but also are asked to identify their Top 5 features (i.e., those features that are most critical for inclusion in next-generation browsers).
• May - The moderators reorganize and possibly trim away feature requests for which little interest was shown.
• June - Phase II review, where participants will be asked to provide importance ratings for each of the feature requests on a scale of 0.0 to 5.0.
• July - The moderators will produce a summary report and notify the major browser vendors about the results.

The process is completely open and Wiki-based, so feel free to contribute^.

posted by MatHertel @ 2.4.08,