What is Surfacing?

Question

Joel Spolsky mentioned "surfacing" on the SO podcast.

What's it mean? (perhaps something like "exposing" (as in "exposing an interface)?

Answer 1

Surfacing

n.

1. emerging to the surface and becoming apparent

Answer 2

Here's a quote from the transcript wiki of podcast 51 where they mention "surfacing." I think they've mentioned it a couple of other times too.

Atwood: That's right. Well one thing we just rolled out was, we're surfacing some of the comments on the question page now, one thing I didn't like about comments was that they were essentially unsearchable, because they were loaded through Javascript, and through Ajax

I think it's basically making sure some content is visible to search engines rather than being loaded by ajax or something. Or making them visible by default.

Answer 3

I've heard it used recently a few times, and in those contexts it has essentially meant "exposing an interface" as you suggest. You have some functionality inside a framework, and you want to make that accessible to the users of that framework. So I guess it's in the sense of "bring some feature out from the depths and making it visible".

Answer 4

The term itself doesn't have any special meaning beyond its normal English meaning. The most common use of surface as a verb in a programming context is probably to surface errors or exceptions, which doesn't mean anything all that precise either. It might mean logging them rather than doing nothing, or failing the request rather than just logging the errors.