CSS Editors Leaderboard
Published 13 years, 10 months pastI recently decided to create a CSS Editors Leaderboard, which is my attempt to rank the various editors of CSS modules based on the current process status of their modules, how current the modules are, and so on. It’s kind of a turn of the wheel for me, given that I started out my CSS career with browser support leaderboards. Now you can see who’s amassed the most spec points, and who’s made the most effective use of their time and energy. Who knows? Maybe some editors will try to game the system by pushing their specs along the process track. That’d be just awful.
One thing of note: I decided to write the leaderboard script so that it directly parses an HTML file to figure out the rankings. You can see the file yourself, if you like. At the moment it’s just a bunch of dls, but at some point I suspect I’ll convert it to a table. The advantage is that it’s easier for other people to fact-check the source data this way: just load it up in a browser.
I thought about just parsing specs directly but it seemed like overkill to load the entirety of the CSS2.1 module just to figure out the process status, publication date, and editor list. And then do that same thing for every one of the 38 tracked modules. This way I have the leaderboard and a central summary of the modules’ status, and hopefully the latter will be even more human-readable in the future.
Anyway, it was a fun little project and now it’s loose in the world. Enjoy.
Comments (7)
Cool, I like it! Seems though that this Eric Meyer guy had better step things up a little or he’ll never get anywhere.
It’d be interesting to see a column on that chart for their browser affiliation (maybe using an icon) for people who happen to work for Mozilla, Opera etc. Also, maybe a link to their websites if they happen to have one.
Nice work Eric!
Alexis: yeah, that guy. What a slacker.
Neal: the complication with indicating affiliation is that people can move from one company to another or decide to retire from salaried work and become “unaffiliated”. To pick one example, Tantek Çelik worked at Apple for many years (long before Safari), Microsoft for many years (working on IE/Mac), and now is independent but working with the Mozilla Foundation. So would I count him for Firefox? What about all those years with IE/Mac?
Linking people’s sites would be easier and is something I might add—though, again, what if someone has changing contact information over time? What if an old-ish spec lists a different URL than one updated last week? I could use the most recent but if someone just started work for Apple then their name shows an Apple URL/email even if they spent ten years working at Opera. Not that anyone besides Jon Hicks ever leaves Opera.
If I were doing this as some sort of timeline, these sorts of questions would be easier to handle, of course. Though how I could fold all this information into a workable timeline visualization is an interesting question in its own right!
Eric, note that Ian Hickson also worked for Opera for several years, after free lancing for Mozilla and before moving to Google… And Elika interned at Opera one summer :)
Taking EDs into account would be helpful. I note that Tab Atkins isn’t listed anywhere, despite editing quite a lot of specs.
Ms2ger: be that as it may, he’s not listed as an author or editor on even one of the modules. I’m aware that he’s been doing a lot of work but I have to go with what’s written in the specifications.
Quite a testosterone-laden list.
With the exception of Elika (aka fantasai), I believe, all male.
This is unfortunate IMHO.