Re: Encoding Standard

Adding Ian, since he might have a thing to say about this.

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 5:54 PM, Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> wrote:
> On 10/14/2013 12:03 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>> E.g. I know some in the WHATWG do not condone the forking done by the
>> W3C, as we see it leading to confusion with implementers and
>> reviewers, but our license still permits it.
>
> In the past I've requested meetings with the WHATWG so we can improve our
> communications.  I would very much appreciate opportunities to unite the web
> community and reduce confusion with implementers and reviewers.  The offer
> is still open.

We can have meetings, but the problems seems pretty clear.
http://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/ was last updated today.
http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest/ is what you might find on Google
searching for XMLHttpRequest and is dated 6 December 2012.

To me it is pretty clear what implementers and reviewers should look
at and when prompted I'll give them that advice. However, my reach is
rather limited.

There are other problems. The W3C draft does not actually acknowledge
who has done the authoring and claims three other people have done it,
while all that can be said is that they have copy-and-pasted from the
https://github.com/whatwg/xhr repository. That is not acceptable
behavior.

To this very day the W3C is actively recruiting people to
copy-and-paste WHATWG original work, e.g. for the DOM and URL
Standards, without contacting the original author(s). I realize the
W3C is more than the W3C Team, but the W3C Team is there to give
advice about appropriate conduct.


> In the interim we have responded to requests from the WHATWG community to
> reduce confusion.  In direct response we have introduced revisions within
> W3C by consensus (such as permissive licenses in Community Groups and now
> forkable licenses in HTML) to try to reduce the confusion with implementers
> and reviewers.

The confusion is about where to look (w3.org/TR vs dev.w3.org vs
dvcs.w3.org vs spec.whatwg.org) and what to implement. Most
implementers, including Microsoft, have learned the hard way that
http://dom.spec.whatwg.org/ (last updated three days ago) is what
matters and http://www.w3.org/TR/dom/ (last updated 6 December 2012)
is not, but this is still biting people often enough for it to be bad.


> I am well aware that for many in the WHATWG community that today's consensus
> is not enough and I'm sorry that we are not there yet. The AB continues to
> take up this topic this year [1 item 3].
>
> [1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/chairs/2013OctDec/0004.html

I realize you're new, but to me it feels like we've been told this
since late 2006, when the W3C admitted it was wrong on HTML. We should
just wait and hope for it to improve.


-- 
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 2013 12:12:42 UTC