Topp Engineering

We’ve been using Xinha at TOPP for a while, and with two of us now core developers, I thought it would be worthwhile to try to hash out what we’re hoping to get out of our investment in Xinha.  Here, as a first step, is a discussion of Xinha-related goals and strategies that Doug, Nick B-­S, Sonali, Ian and I all agree on.

Goals

This section will address the goals which inform and are served by our commitment to Xinha.

1. Promote a document model of the web for easy human-readability, machine-readability and interoperability in a broader network of applications and services.

2. Build best-of-breed tools which can be repurposed for a variety­ of uses and in a variety of contexts, and which are good enough to attract business and financing on their own, whether as standalone products or as candidates for integration into other products.

3. Develop real communities of users and developers to collectively steer and own the software that we are involved with, with TOPP’s role in each limited to that of an initial catalyst if necessary, and to that of one equal user, producer and beneficiary among many.

4. Provide a solid base of tools to enable more and richer creation, editing and remixing of documents on the web to enable a more free and active exchange of communications, ideas and culture.

5. Help as many people as possible through our work, whether their rel­ationship to that work is casual or committed, technical or non-technical.

Strategies

This section will address the strategic directions we have set for our involvement with Xinha to further our broad goals.

1. An essential c­omponent of the strategy is developing and promoting useful and easy tools for web document creation and editing.­

• To promote wide adoption, we must provide end-user value up front and allow our own value to naturally emerge from the user’s intentional actions.  To that end, our tools must push HTML and CSS down to the level of implementation details for the casual end user, and the casual user’s preferred actions should epiphenominally contribute to a document-driven web.
• To promote deep adoption, we must instruct interested end users in the philosophy and practice of the document model.  To that end, our tools must provide tiered layers of value which simultaneously steer end users toward a deeper understanding of the underlying technologies and reward curious end users for their hard-won knowledge with increased functionality or flexibility — but without sacrificing the immediate value of a casual user’s interactions with the tools: upfront investment not required, and learning curves remaining smooth.

2. A WYSIWYG text editor is a very promising candidate to add to our portfolios of tools and expertise; it has broad applicability and appeal.  Because of the nature of a WYSIWYG editor, it is not likely to be a direct source of funding or work; rather, its value will mainly come from reusing it as a component of increasingly many projects.  Its presence in our portfolio increases the value of our portfolio as a whole.

• To ensure reusability for a variety of uses, the software must provide flexible functionality and user interface.  To that end, the software should provide a sensible (and, ideally, requiring no deep technical knowledge) configuration layer, enable plugin development and skinning capabiities, and should provide tools to minimize the effort and overhead of reconfiguration.
• To ensure reusability in a variety of contexts, the software must be easy to install, decoupled from any particular broader environment, and integratable into any number of broader environments.  To that end, the software must rely upon and promote general standards and best practices for intercommunication and integration of application components.
• To build a best-of-breed WYSIWYG editor, the software must implement powerful functionality solidly and must present an extremely appealing interface to users.  To that end, we need to identify that functionality and interface by iterative use and user feedback.

3. Xinha has a history of community activity and has a commitment to real collective code ownership; it is rightly billed as “the community-built open source online HTML editor.”

• To ensure that Xinha remains owned by its community and not by TOPP or any other organization, we must be careful not to put anything into the core repository which narrowly serves TOPP’s needs or does not have the support of the community.
• To encourage an active and dedicated community to steer the project, we should pursue initiatives to increase Xinha’s visibility and to build interest and enthusiasm, and we should be prepared to offer any necessary organizational resources toward infrastructure for an open source community.

5. In addition to building a great WYSIWYG editor, we should actively share the domain-specific knowledge we gain in the process of building it.