Re: WebIDL Spec Status

On 6/24/14, 6:56 AM, Charles McCathie Nevile wrote:
> While nobody is offering an editor who can get the work
> done, this argument is in any case academic (unless the editor's
> availability is predicated on the outcome, in which case it would be mere
> political machinations).

I strongly disagree with that characterization.

The fact is, for browser vendors a stable v1 Web IDL snapshot as we have 
right now is not very useful, since that's not what they need to 
implement in practice: there are too many APIs currently being specified 
that cannot be expressed in that snapshot.  So it's really hard to 
justify devoting resources to such a snapshot.

On the other hand, making Web IDL reflect ongoing specification reality 
is something that's really useful to browser vendors, so it might be 
easier to convince them to spend time on that.  No political 
machinations involved.

A more recent snapshot might be more useful, but is still likely to end 
up not being an actual implementation target because there are still too 
many changes happening in terms of ES integration and the like.

I don't have a good solution to this problem, unfortunately.  :(

On the other hand, the only audience I see for a snapshot are 
specification writers who don't want/need the newer things we're adding 
to Web IDL.  Are there other audiences?  Are there actually such 
specification writers?  The recent set of changes to Web IDL have all 
been driven by specification needs.

-Boris

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2014 13:15:10 UTC