In the course of the event refactoring I’ve been doing some work on GroupData. This is the first time I’ve really dug into this data, and I’m quite dismayed at how out of date it is.
There are I think 136 APIs listed in GroupData. As far as I can tell, 53 of them, (almost 40%), should just be removed from the file. I’ve listed them below, along with an annotation of why we should remove them. “no docs” means I couldn’t find any docs for the API anywhere.
Alarm API FxOS, archived
Application Compatibility Layer FxOS, no docs
App Cache * Obsolete
Apps Marketplace, archived
Audio Channels API * FxOS, archived
Archive API ? no docs
Battery API * Obsolete
Bluetooth API (Firefox OS) FxOS, archived
Browser API * Obsolete, no support
Camera API FxOS, archived
Contacts API * FxOS, archived
Data Store API FxOS, archived
Device Storage API * FxOS, archived
Directory Upload API ? no docs
Download API ? no docs
DOM (Non-standard) Obsolete, archived
Engineering Mode API * ? no docs
Firefox OS FxOS, archived
FMRadio API * FxOS, archived
HTML Microdata API Obsolete, should be archived?
HTML Undo Manager API Not implemented or documented
Identity BrowserID, archived
Idle API FxOS, archived
Input Port API ? no docs, FxOS?
Inter-App Connection API ? no docs
Kill Switch API ? no docs
L10N API FxOS, archived
Mobile Connection API * FxOS, archived
Mobile Messaging API * FxOS, archived
Mozilla Payment API ? no docs
MSISDN Verification API ? no docs
Network Stats API FxOS, archived
NFC API FxOS, archived
Permissions API (Firefox OS) FxOS, archived
Power Management API FxOS, archived
Request Sync API ? no docs
Resource Statistics API FxOS, archived
Settings API * FxOS, archived
Simple Push API * Obsolete, archived
Social API Archived
Speaker Manager API * ? no docs
System Update API ? no docs
TCP Socket API * FxOS, archived
Time and Clock API * FxOS, archived
TV API ? no docs
UDP Socket API ? no docs
Voicemail API FxOS, archived
Wake Lock API FxOS, archived
Web Activities FxOS, archived
Web Manifest * ? no docs
Web Telephony API * FxOS, archived
WiFi Information API * FxOS, archived
WiFi P2P API * FxOS, archived
APIs with “*” next to them are slated for removal already, in https://github.com/mdn/kumascript/pull/1136.
This isn’t just a theoretical thing: all the APIs in GroupData are listed in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API, which is I think a fairly high-traffic page. It’s not a very good page, but it’s made much worse by the fact that we list almost twice as many APIs as we should, and that if someone clicks one of these links, there’s an almost 50% chance they will land on a page like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/B2G_OS/API/Alarm_API, which is surely not a good experience.
To be clear, I’m not at this point proposing to delete any docs. Just to remove these entries from GroupData.
Obviously it’s entirely possible I’ve made some mistakes and am proposing the removal of some super-important APIs, in which case that would be good to know.