What should the scope of this site be?
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5 years ago James Douglas

So far, this site is for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

What else should we allow people to ask questions about here?

Top Answer
5 years ago Jack Douglas

An alternative:

  • Call this community html.ta (‘HTML and CSS’), and include closely related areas like SVG, LESS, but not Javascript
  • Have javascript.ta covering jQuery (but not npm or node.js specific questions)
  • cross-feed html.ta and javascript by default
  • php.ta as a standalone community
  • webserver.ta covering Apache, Node, etc (Node developers can manually cross-feed from javascript.ta and vice versa, PHP devs from php.ta etc)
Answer #2
5 years ago Monica

There are two main types of questions I would like to be able to ask here:

  1. I am building something on the web; how do I do X?
  2. I am a consumer of a web site and need to be able to adjust my experience; how do I do this userscript/CSS override/browser extension to solve my problem?

I see these as related even though they’re from different “sides”; if, for example, someone in #1 did accessibility differently then the question in #2 might not arise, but we live in an imperfect and ever-changing world.

#2 runs the risk of veering into general browser questions (how do I do such-and-such in Opera?), so we should decide early on if we’re ok with general browser questions. The site is currently called “Web”, not “Web Development”, so I think there’s justification for some amount of “consumer” content, but I don’t know how much is fine and how much is too much.

Answer #3
5 years ago Jack Douglas

Whatever other nuances of scope we decide on, I think we should make a strong distinction between server-side and client-side, and keep everything server-side off topic here.

So PHP, ASP, apache, nginx etc should be out of scope. We probably need a webserver.ta for those.

Answer #4
5 years ago David

What does Web.TA think about supporting particular “platforms”. SO has a fairly full set of wordpress-* tags, for example, also expressionengine, drupal, etc. etc.

The case may be fairly clear for such systems, and insofar as they involve HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all good. Does this extend to PHP, Ruby, Angular… (and React is javascript, after all) based frameworks/portals/cms/etc?

Answer #5
5 years ago David

One potentially grey area would be requests for recommendations, typically for software, but they could also be for web technologies to meet a particular use-case. (In the SE network, SoftwareRecs allows for e.g. [cms] requests for particular scenarios.)

Such questions frequently shade off toward “opinion based”, unless the question is framed with particular care.

I think my personal preference at this moment would be to regard sharply-written requests for recommendations as on-topic. Almost inevitably, especially as the community grows, such questions will appear, and they can be valuable. Vague or blatantly opinion-based questions could be edited into shape, or refined via the integrated chat system, or consigned to oblivion if beyond retrieval.

P.s. I assume we want to populate this Q&A with a variety of responses, some of which will be (even intentionally) “bad” in order to describe boundaries (inclusion and exclusion) effectively.

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5 years
Monica replying to Jack Douglas — Wednesday, 13th May 2020 02:39

Ah, that’s the clue I was missing. I didn’t realize they were that separable. (Well, I didn’t know you could have a career in PowerShell at all; I thought it was just one of many tools a developer would use.)

18 hours
David replying to Jack Douglas — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 08:57

This matches my sentiments pretty closely. ;) (But I’m not sure what follows from that!) (If anything…)

David — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 08:55

I wonder, too, if feature development on tags would help. Some day, I imagine, you’ll be able to click on a tag and filter on it. I wonder, too, if some day you’ll be able to “follow” certain tags, and “ignore” certain tags. That could also help.

David — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 08:54

I’m not clear on how the “sub-communities” thing is working here, but the cross-sites feeds is brilliant (IMO), and mitigates the watching and answering side of things. Asking in the right place would be an issue (for some of us — people like me, anyway).

David — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 08:53

The issue for the growing community/ies is where to ask your question, and (atm) CAN you ask your question. I know, e.g., I’ll have PHP questions along the, and thought when this proposal was made that this would be the place to ask them. And if the resolution for Web.TA is “not”, then I’ll make a “WebScripts.TA” proposal (or whatever!) on Meta.

David — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 08:51

This is a helpful discussion; worthwhile observations on all sides, and clearly quite different perspectives on the help “Web.TA” could/should bring. Probably the name is a bit unhelpful now, as what counts as “web” clearly is very elastic, and means different things to different people. I would have thought that “building things for the web” would naturally include things that Jack believes should obvioulsy be excluded, so — there’s some work to do here!

32 minutes
Jack Douglas replying to Monica — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 08:19

yes that’s right. in that ecosystem you can easily have a career in just C# or just PowerShell and never touch or even care about the other

6 hours
Monica replying to Jack Douglas — Tuesday, 12th May 2020 01:54

Isn’t that the approach you took with .NET/C#/PowerShell? (I don’t know that ecosystem well enough to know if it’s parallel; just going on what you said about it when setting it up.)

3 hours
Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:27

it’s funny what a big issue this is on databases.ta — postgres, oracle and sql server are very different technologies but they attract very similar people, and there is lots of mutual interest (and occasional career cross-over too). MySQL is a very similar technology but a completely different community

Adám — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:24

I don’t know, really. Code golf forms a community, Judaism.SE felt community-like to me too (but maybe because of serving an already pre-existing community), but SO never did.

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:24

I’m not trying to draw that distinction too firmly, I just think it’s easier to go too far in the other direction

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:22

do you agree that communities form more naturally around tasks/roles that around techhologies?

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:22

(despite them being very different beasts)

Jack Douglas replying to Adám — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:22

that would be a clean way of separating topics, but it would go against the natural community grain, because (I think) there are lots of people wrestling with JS,HTML and CSS all at the same time

14 minutes
Adám replying to Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:08

So maybe there should be a bunch of more specific sites, one for each of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and people can include feeds they want?

Jack Douglas replying to Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 22:04

agreed on all counts — in this particular case I’m more worried about going too big on the topic than too small, because JavaScript alone on SO gets 1k questions per day

37 minutes
Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 21:27

Maybe the idea of sub-communities that is happening with .Net/C#/Powershell mitigates that.

Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 21:26

@Jack I don’t know enough about the server-side stuff to be able to evaluate a lot of what you’ve said. I guess we can wing it, especially if we’re going to err on inclusivity. I don’t think we’re at risk of becoming SO-like in this regard. SO doesn’t have a community; we don’t want to be that. But sometimes communities have overlapping sub-communities, and that seems ok. If, for example, Writing had to split out the tech-writing questions from the fiction questions, the tech-writing site would die. (SE tried to do that to us a few years back with a failed beta.)

31 minutes
Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:56

we can still err towards inclusivity in general, but if we include those we are a kind of mini-SO and won’t (I think) function as a community

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:55

btw I’m not saying we shouldn’t be generous in any niche or grey areas, just that PHP, node.js, apache, ASP etc should be off-topic

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:53

which should be silo-ed from the rest of us

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:53

WP is an unnecessary evil

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:52

most treat one as a necessary evil

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:52

only a very small minority of people are at home with server side and client side development

Jack Douglas replying to David — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:51

I’m not really thinking about overlap in terms of technology — but in terms of people. Most of us might have to dabble in lots of technologies but we aren’t at home in them all

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:50

“How do I split a text on spaces” --> “with jquery” will not make sense server side

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:49

the answers people are looking for are mostly going to make sense in the context they are working in

Jack Douglas replying to Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:48

I think the way Javascript is used server-side is very different to how it is used client side — the node.js world is quite different from the ‘how do I wrestle with browser quirks’ world

Jack Douglas replying to Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 20:47

yes, all the client-side stuff is ultimately served up by a server somewhere, but CSS is interpreted on the client side, and that’s the distinction I’m suggesting, and the rationale is that I think the roles are distinct — apache admin is sysops and has more overlap with general *nix than it does with creating a web app

an hour
Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 19:54

Same split with CSS. I use client-side CSS and Stylus to try to work around accessibility issues in web sites. Web sites, of course, serve CSS (which is how clients have a hook to override it).

13 minutes
Adám — Monday, 11th May 2020 19:41

Even better example: “How do I split a text on spaces?” is on-topic if they mean in client-side JavaScript, but off-topic if they are asking about Node running as back-end, even though the answer is identical in those two cases.

3 hours
Monica replying to David — Monday, 11th May 2020 16:23

Relatedly, with that split, a question about Javascript belongs on one site if it’s JS served by the web server and on the other site if it’s in a userscript. That doesn’t seem great for people later looking for answers; they’d have to check both sites.

an hour
David replying to Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 14:57

And to take exactly this: “...WordPress template related then I'd say it should be off-topic, but if it's just about the html/css...” — so if OP says, “I have this WP template for which I can’t solve this HTML/CSS issue”, that’s off-topic, but if OP says, “I can’t solve this HTML/CSS issue”, that’s on topic? (Still trying to work this out!)

David replying to Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 14:54

So, in any case, what is the rationale for the hard separation of server-side and client-side? (Not so clear to me as, e.g. “Software” v. “Hardware” Recs!) I would have thought there was sufficient overlap, synergy, even symbiosis(!), that keeping them together would add value. I.e., help me to see what the value in separating them brings.

David — Monday, 11th May 2020 14:51

@Jack (Just mulling!) : “We probably need a webserver.ta for those.” So should the name of this site be webclient.ta? Otherwise, I can envisage (even after the site(s) are well established) there being some confusion for new users. Even old ones for edge cases which are difficult to decide where they should go.

an hour
Monica replying to Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 14:05

I’m a beginner; I don’t always know the difference. If I ask “how do I do X” and the answer is “do this thing in CPanel”, does that retroactively make the question off-topic? (I see bunches of stuff on CPanel; I don’t know what most of it does. I want to solve what I think are simpler problems, but those things might be relevant?)

an hour
Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 13:01

you couldn’t take my PHP (which does database lookups etc) and produce the same HTML I do in your environment

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 13:01

iiuc they will do so in any environment

Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 13:00

something like TypeScript or CoffeeScript on the other hand will produce vanilla Javascript

Jack Douglas replying to David — Monday, 11th May 2020 12:59

I wouldn’t say PHP transpiles to HTML — what we normally think of as a PHP file is really an HTML file with embedded PHP script(s), but you could swap out PHP for any general purpose scripting language like ASP or Python etc.

2 hours
Adám replying to David — Monday, 11th May 2020 11:19

Right, I intentionally did not include PHP there, but yes, it might be a bad distinction.

David — Monday, 11th May 2020 11:12

And take @Monica 's #1, “I am building something on the web; how do I do X?”: if we go with Jack’s “out of scope” (“PHP, ASP, apache, nginx etc”), that would eliminate a good proportion of “building things on the web”!

David — Monday, 11th May 2020 11:11

@Jack + @Adám So … (please understand, I’m very much an amateur in this!!) … doesn’t PHP extend (“transpile”?) HTML? I have a sneaky feeling that policing the client/server distinction is going to be rough.

3 hours
Jack Douglas — Monday, 11th May 2020 08:30

things that can be used server-side or client side (like LESS) should be given the benefit of the doubt 😃

Jack Douglas replying to Monica — Monday, 11th May 2020 08:29

imo that should depend on what the ‘thing’ you are trying to do is — if it is cpanel or, say, WordPress template related then I’d say it should be off-topic, but if it’s just about the html/css then on topic

7 hours
ArtOfCode replying to David — Monday, 11th May 2020 01:01

Aye, both. HR has standards for both questions and answers; questions have to have sufficient detail, and answers have to be more than “I did 5 seconds of Googling, maybe this will work”.

2 hours
Monica — Sunday, 10th May 2020 22:58

@Jack would “I am trying to do this thing on my hosted site” be ok? That’s server-side in the sense that the content is on a server, but not server admin (I have no idea what combination of Apache/nginx/whatever serves my content).

3 hours
Adám — Sunday, 10th May 2020 20:23

@David I’d say all libraries that intend to extend or transpile to HTML, CSS and JS are on-topic, e.g. LESS and CoffeeScript.

David replying to ArtOfCode — Sunday, 10th May 2020 20:15

Interesting - thanks for that input. When you say “getting high-quality recs”, do you mean from OP’s? or in the answers? or both?! I participated some on SoftwareRecs and … now that I reflect on it … it would be both. I had to get pushed to frame my (few) questions more sharply, and answers needed to be filled out with some realistic and documented experience. Anyway—will see where this one goes.

2 hours
ArtOfCode — Sunday, 10th May 2020 18:03

Those aren’t mutually exclusive - you can still make “what’s best for me, right now” helpful to other people in the future - but it means you have to require authors to stick to rigorous standards, which… they tend not to.

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