I posted about this in both the WebPlatform.org blog and Dabblet’s blog, but I thought it might be interesting to many readers of this blog as well:
As many of you probably know, I’ve started working for W3C Developer Relations since this August. Half of my time is devoted to WebPlatform.org, a very promising project to document the web with the help of all major players, in a vendor-neutral way. Even before I joined W3C, we discussed using a hosted, customized version of dabblet in WebPlatform.org, as a platform for live code examples. I recently started working towards making this happen.
A lot of changes and improvements need to be made to achieve this, but the good news is, most of these will be pushed to dabblet.com as well! In a nutshell, this is what I’m currently working on:
- Adding JavaScript support — This will be a challenge UX-wise, as it shouldn’t run on every keystroke, like the HTML and CSS, but it should run on startup and it should be straight-forward how to get it to run. Perhaps it will also run after a significant pause in typing.
- Dabblets that are not stored in Github, but get their data through POST requests.
- Improving cross-browser support
- Strengthening security
- Integrating Prism. Dabblet’s syntax highlighter might have been Prism’s precursor, but currently Prism has solved many of its bugs, and these fixes need to be pushed to dabblet at some point.
- General bug fixing
These will probably be gradually rolled out in dabblet.com and tested by the community, before we integrate dabblet into WebPlatform.org. If a new feature is significant enough, there will be a new blog post about it here, but don’t expect blog posts about bugfixes. I’m really excited to see dabblet flourish, and I believe you will be too, once these updates are out!