[wp-hackers] GSoC Draft Proposal

[Mihai Chereji]

On 03/29/2011 05:06 PM, Eric Mann wrote:
> Mihai,
>
> I think your idea sounds like a fantastic idea, but I have a couple of
> concerns.
>
> First, you suggest using localStorage for image/media as well.  Some
> browsers place size limits on localStorage (I've seen 5MB for some systems,
> 10MB for others, and unlimited for a few).  How do you expect to work with
> this limitation?
>
> I'm just assuming you'll have some kind of graceful degradation in place for
> the ~22% of users who don't have access to localStorage (using the stats you
> referenced in your proposal).  I'm a huge fan of using new technologies, but
> I know from personal experience that a lot of end users (think larger
> corporations using WordPress for intranet sites and corporate blogs) are
> tied to specific browser versions that don't support localStorage - some IT
> departments still force IE7 company-wide, and it doesn't support this system
> at all.
>
> Since your stated goal is to drop Flash "in time" rather than immediately,
> do you plan to leave existing systems in place for users of outdated
> systems?
>
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Mihai Chereji<mihai.chereji at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>     I have posted a draft proposal for GSoC on my blog, you can view it at
>> http://croncobaurul.wordpress.com/2011/03/27/gsoc-proposal/ .
>>
>>     As always, feedback is more than welcome.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mihai Chereji
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Hello Eric,

Thank you for the interest shown in my idea.

     My first reaction to your first concern (hitting the localStorage 
size limit) was "well that's easy, I'll just periodically read for the 
available size and prompt the user for more space when needed". But I 
wasn't really sure if there was a way to do with through the API . So I 
headed over to http://www.w3.org/TR/webstorage/#disk-space.
"User agents may prompt the user when quotas are reached, allowing the 
user to grant a site more space. This enables sites to store many 
user-created documents on the user's computer, for instance."

Much like on the file system, it is out of the hands of the application 
what happens when we run out of space, but a graceful solution should be 
provided by the browser. Anyway, even 5 MB is a lot of space when all 
you store is text.

As for your other concerns, I have specified in the proposal that these 
projects would be delivered at first as (separate) plug-ins, so no 
unsuspecting user would use this features at first. But yes, when it 
comes to the File uploader, where less than half of all browsing 
citizens would have support for that (maybe it would be more, 
considering wordpress.com browser usage, don't know, but still) it would 
be irresponsible to degrade the current experience for innovations' and 
"ooh, shiny"'s sake.

The local backup fallback solution is actually what I would consider 
kind of a challenge. I suspect that upon detection of the lack of 
localStorage, the plugin could keep all the logs it would normally keep 
in a custom object and when the user would want to save a draft/post a 
post offline, it would prompt to save that object to a file, and remind 
the user upon going online to upload the file so the post would be 
updated. This is very preliminary, and indeed, quite a challenge to 
obtain a similar experience on all platforms (which, to be honest, was 
not my initial intention with the plugins, but it's a good concept 
nevertheless).


Thanks,
Mihai