Re: scroll anchoring

> On Dec 1, 2016, at 09:16, Steve Kobes <skobes@chromium.org> wrote:
> 
> This is a reminder that the scroll anchoring opt out / exclusion API (overflow-anchor) has been proposed at
> 
> https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/676
> 
> and is expected to ship in Chrome soon.  Let me know if you have feedback or concerns.

Hi,

On the one hand, this proposal seems a good idea, and after a brief review of the spec I think it is sane. On the other hand, from a process point of view, I am concerned.

The latest position of the CSSWG about how to ship stuff is here: https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS/#responsible. TL;DR: don't ship stuff in production until the spec is CR.

Between the first public version of the spec[1] and intent to ship [2], there's just 22 days. This spec has had a grand total of 3 github issues (one from me). This is a far cry from CR.

Here's what's at the top of www.chromium.com/blink:
   Blink's Mission:
   To improve the open web through 
   technical innovation and good citizenship

On the same page, there's this:
  “we strive to ensure that the features we ship by default have open standards.”

While Google is doing great on the technical innovation part, I am much more worried about the good citizenship part. Using incubation to completely bypass the standardization process doesn't sound like good citizenship to me. Writing up something in a personal github repo in public is better than not writing up anything, but it falls short of being an open standards. 

I believe the right thing to do would be to hold off shipping, submit this to the CSSWG, and get a FPWD. That should be doable in a single teleconf, even possibly offline (i.e. less than a week). Then you get wide review, and get a CR. Then you ship.

From FPWD to CR it's a bit longer, but if the spec is indeed ready with no need to change anything, it could still be done within a few months. I know that is not instant, but you could have asked for ED/FPWD a month ago, so that's not to be blamed on the CSSWG, and that's what it takes to get genuine feedback.

I hope you'll be as good at good citizenship as you are at technical innovation.

—Florian

[1] https://github.com/skobes/ScrollAnchoring/commit/47c1960dcbfe076dd3d2de1482690748fba3ffff
[2] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!msg/blink-dev/VJmxBRYGVIE/CogbbYWXCAAJ

Received on Thursday, 1 December 2016 16:10:38 UTC