Re: Apparent WebDriver meeting?

Hi David,

A bunch of people indeed meet yesterday to discuss the explainer
<https://github.com/w3c/webdriver/blob/master/webdriver-bidi/webdriver.md> and
some of the BiDi issues <https://github.com/w3c/webdriver/labels/BiDi>
filed by James. This grew organically out of a first Google/Microsoft
meeting to gauge the level of interest about a month ago. Since it's such
early days for this workstream, I don't think any of us have considered
whether to use existing WG meetings, public minutes, etc., we just met to
see what would come of it.

Trying to summarize some of the discussion:

   - Specify how to enable an event stream
   <https://github.com/w3c/webdriver/issues/1501> - The basic problem is
   the full stream of events might be too much, so you'd need some way to
   enable a subset of all possible events. The next problem is that there are
   some events from targets you don't know if/when they'll appear, like
   iframes and service workers, that you want to subscribe to if they appear.
   We thought that some per-session mechanism to enable events per domain and
   possibly per target type might work.
   - Update goals in the explainer document
   <https://github.com/w3c/webdriver/issues/1499> - I think we ended up
   concurring with what James wrote on devtools protocols. While being able to
   use BiDi together with devtools protocols would probably help a transition,
   it's no requirement that BiDi is layered on top of a devtools protocol, and
   for example how to get from identifiers in one protocol to the other, when
   both are supported, would perhaps be as extra properties or "convert this
   to that" commands in one of the protocols.
   - Specify a low-level transport format
   <https://github.com/w3c/webdriver/issues/1498> - It sounds like JSON-RPC
   isn't exactly what we need, but there isn't anything else that is. Basing
   something on JSON-RPC but writing a stringent test suite for it sounded
   reasonable. It's not clear if transmitting binary as base64 will be enough
   of a problem to avoid JSON-RPC, I got the sense that most implementers
   don't think so.

@Mathias Bynens <mths@google.com> or others on this list might be able to
add more detail, and in any case it'd be a good idea to get this into the
issues rather than notes.

I've not seen any suggestion to spin up a CG for this, but enough people
found it useful enough to repeat it on a monthly basis. I think it would
make sense to have the BiDi meeting be open to any WG members and to take
minutes in public. What are the logistics for doing that?

Philip

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 10:56 AM David Burns <
david.burns@theautomatedtester.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I am just sharing this as there appears to be hidden meetings about the
> WebDriver BiDi work that does not include anyone from the Selenium group,
> the editors of the webdriver specification and probably others (who knows
> as it was a closed meeting).
>
> Has there been some agreement to move this out to a community group
> instead of using the working group?
>
> David
>