The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki for this initiative. 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. 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.
ajax联盟在上次会议上，提出了几十项关于浏览器功能上的改进建议。基于此，呼吁整个业界，包括非联盟成员，到wiki网站上提出意见并投票。联盟制定了相关日程表。最终，7月份，会正式向主要浏览器厂商提交相关调查统计表。
评论：由于联盟有广泛的基础，这次行动呼吁，代表了业界对浏览器厂商的期待和需求，加强互动性必将成为浏览器厂商下一步重点考虑方向。此次行动呼吁，会加速浏览器的发展趋势。