Re: AppCache post-mortem?

Hi All,

Thanks a lot for the excellent points that have been brought up in this
thread; I'd like to propose a summary of where I think we are, and would
like for volunteers to step forward to bring up more concrete plans that
we can include in our proposal.

* technical work item: partial cache update; Tobie and Chaals at least
agree this is an important use case, and presumably have a reasonable
idea of what the requirements are; Alex has looked into the
(non-negligible) amount of work that would be needed to make this true,
and believe NavigationController is a first step in the direction that
would make this possible. 
It would be great if Tobie, Chaals and Alex could caucus to document the
requirements and challenges for that particular piece of technology;
this would be a great contribution to a potential follow-up
specification work.

* structural challenge: there seems to be consensus that it is currently
too hard for developers to influence the course of a spec, even when the
state of the related technology is close to being unusable.
Several proposals have been voiced to help reduce that barrier:
- make it much easier to submit bug reports, with a bug squad that would
actually triage and dispatch bug to the relevant working groups as
needed
- make it easier for developers to provide more qualitative and
quantitative feedback on various technologies via surveys
- get developers effectively represented in the W3C process via a new
class of membership or through an elected representative

As Alex pointed out, getting more developer feedback is only useful if
that feedback has real influence on the course of our various
technologies, incl. in their implementation in browsers — so an
important aspect of making this work is to determine what parameters of
the way we gather or represent that feedback will make it truly
influential.

I believe these 3 proposals have merit and can bring a very positive
impact on W3C (well beyond our gap with native); but as they stand,
they're still mostly vaporware, so I would need volunteers willing to
dig further into them to turn them into more concrete proposals on which
we could elaborate. Any taker? Robin? Alex? Yehuda?

(I'll also ping our devrel team since this whole thread is very relevant
to them)

Dom

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 08:13:08 UTC