Standards Basics?

Hi, folks–

A few people have suggested that since many attendees aren't familiar 
with W3C, some initial prep would be useful, possibly including more 
treatment on the workshop page.

I thought I might put some general criteria for when something is 
suitable for standardization on the site (again, not assuming that 
anything in blockchain is yet ready for standards). Here's a rough 
draft, please let me know if you think this would be useful to have on 
the site:

[[
There are a few criteria that are indicators for whether something is 
suitable for standardization:

1) Is there a clear problem statement that this would solve, for a 
significant number of people?

2) Is there a good starting point, such as a clear solution, or a set of 
competing solutions?

3) Do we have the right stakeholders ready to commit to the work, 
including implementers who would deploy the feature, and individuals 
willing to write, review, and test the specification?

For standardization at W3C specifically, we focus on the Web, in three 
main areas:
* client-side (browser-based) features, like markup languages, 
JavaScript APIs, or user-facing features; this is our main focus
* data and formats, such as interchange formats, 
vocabularies/ontologies, and languages to manipulate data; note that 
this area is usually treated with some skepticism by browser makers
* communication protocols; we do this much more rarely, typically only 
when there's a corresponding client-side API, and usually in partnership 
with IETF

]]

Regards–
Doug

Received on Friday, 13 May 2016 07:41:39 UTC