Issues

The near-term goal is that compatibility data lives in the API rather than on the MDN page, and MDN contributors maintain this data in the API instead of editing wiki pages. As this plan is executed, limitations are discovered in API, and changes are made and deployed.

When MDN is using the API as the primary source of compatibility data, we’ll increment the API version for backward-incompatible changes. Until then, the v1 and v2 APIs will be modified with the evolving design.

This page outlines planned changes in the API. It doesn’t describe all the known bugs and issues - see tracking bug 996570 for a detailed list.

API Tasks

Here are the planned tasks that will require code changes to the API:

  • Refactor Slugs - Slugs were designed to be human-friendly aliases for resources, and also to be natural key alternatives to auto-incrementing IDs. However, whenever they are used for these purposes, they are found to have issues and require adjusting. For example, Browser slugs were adjusted to remove the “desktop by default” bias (bug 1128525). Feature slugs had issues when the MDN page had a title that bumped up against the 50 character limit (bug 1078699). Slugs will be modified to be changeable by privileged users, instead of being set once at creation time. They may also be expanded beyond 50 characters, become a list of optional aliases, and be renamed in some cases. 3rd party developers should not rely on slugs remaining constant for the life of the API.
  • Switch from Auto-Incrementing IDs to UUIDs (bug 1230306) - Resources are accessed by IDs, which using the database’s auto-incrementing integers. This means that two instances of the API could have the same data available at different IDs. Tools currently use slugs and other “permanent” attributes to identify resources as the same, even when IDs change. This is error-prone, and since slugs are planned to change, it would be useful to use UUIDs instead, so that the ID becomes a strong identifier between API instances.
  • Recover deleted items (bug 1159349) - The History API could be used to recover deleted items, by administrators or users. The API needs to be modified to allow the reversion PATCH to deleted resources.
  • Move to api.browsercompat.org (bug 1153329) - https://browsercompat.org will be the user-facing contribution interface and data browser. https://api.browsercompat.org will be the application-facing interface. This may require renaming the github repository, moving paths, and dropping sample views.
  • Other v1/v2 API tasks (tracking bug 1240757) - See this tracking bug for other issues assigned to the v1/v2 API milestone.
  • Known JSON API v1.0 issues (tracking bug 1243225) - The v2 API is a partial implementation of the JSON API v1.0 specification. There are known issues around optional functionality like sorting and including linked resources, as well as differences in error representations. See this tracking bug for known issues.

Data Tasks

Here are the planned tasks that involve adding or changing data in the API:

  • Add Feature IDs to MDN document data (bug 1240774) - The mechanism for including a Compatibility table on MDN is evolving. The latest idea is that the Feature ID will be stored in the MDN document model, so that the existing parameterless KumaScript can used to inject the table. There are open design questions, such as how the IDs will be set, if they need to change, and, if so, who will change them and how.

  • Import Data from MDN - The majority of the project work has been building a scraper capable of importing existing data from MDN. As of September 2015, the scraper can extract data from most MDN pages, and can pinpoint issues that require page changes. The scraped data has to be committed to the API, and this process is ongoing.

  • Populate Browser Version Data - MDN has detailed information for Firefox releases, and much less for other browsers. The version model supports some data, such as a release date, a retirement date, and URLs for release notes. Versions can also be sorted with respect to the related browser. This information can’t be imported, and must be entered into the API. Some sources for this data include:

Future Tasks

Once MDN is using the API as the primary data source for compatibility data, we can move on to other goals.

This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Supporting other relations between resources. For example, the CSS property color can be assigned a CSS color type such as color=red. The CSS property background-color can also be assigned CSS color types. Different browsers may support a different set of named colors. This relation can’t be directly represented in the API, but can be partially modeled with HTML links.
  • Support test-driven compatibility data. This is generated by browser vendors and standardization supporters, and can be implemented as separate applications using the compatibility API.