Re: scroll anchoring

On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 8:10 AM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:
>> 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.

Rick already responded (in a way that breaks threading in my client
and possibly others, so here's the link
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2016Dec/0011.html>).
A few more things I want to add to his message, tho:

* in addition to the topic being discussed mostly off-record at
previous meetings, the spec was officially presented in a short
discussion during the Houdini meeting at TPAC, to general approval
* the spec was pulled into Steve's personal repo just as a temporary
measure to isolate it from the WICG/interventions repo, with the
intent that it be quickly transferred to its own WICG repo.  The
request for a WICG repo was made on Oct 10 (same day as it was
extracted), but nothing ever happened.  I pinged the WICG chairs, and
it turns out it was just missed - Chris says he accidentally dropped
it due to the chaos of prepping for Chrome Dev Summit at the time.
That's being fixed now, and it'll be transferred to WICG shortly.

Sorry for the two-month delay there, I know it doesn't look great.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 2 December 2016 22:27:57 UTC