Re: [Powerbox] New draft based on further collaboration and prototyping

hallo all,

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Robin Berjon <robin@robineko.com> wrote:
>
>> The current version of the Powerbox spec is ready for wider
>> prototyping work and we look forward to collaboration and feedback
>> from this WG. We would like to see the Powerbox become a W3C
>> Recommendation from this WG.
>
> I agree that this would be a good path to follow. The first step is to give it a home in CVS. I believe that you already have an account on dev.w3, so the simplest thing is probably that you add a "powerbox" directory to http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/ and place it there. The next step would be to agree on what makes the draft "good enough" for a First Public WD. Apart from general consideration about quality and pubrules which you already know and which I'm not worried about, a general rule of thumb which we use in this WG is that ideally a FPWD ought to be roughly and to the best of one's guesses feature-complete (though of course it doesn't need to be perfect :) The reason for this is that it provides somewhat better protection against IP issues for everyone. If you think we're roughly there, then we can issue a call for consensus to publish the document. We'll deal with the delicious vagaries of Rec-track life afterwards.


I would like to comment on the concern that until actually the actions
from "The Prague Doctrine" [1] are completed and we can safely assume
that we can do a mapping from WebIDL to a RESTful interface (in this
specific case, to the model Powerbox proposes) I think it may be not a
good idea to include Powerbox inside the structure of DAP. The reason
being that the group decided to focus on Javascript APIs and by
extension on the formal definitions on WebIDL that may be mapped to
other methods. This is consistent with other initiatives (like JIL or
BONDI, and now WAC) so also gives us a point of alignment with them.
If Powerbox is not one of the alternatives that can be used into that
framework, we would have to basically create specific definitions for
it, and therefore add fragmentation.

Moreover, just the fact that developers will have to adequate their
code for making calls to the APIs by one method (js objects) or
another (powerbox) can already add extra fragmentation, but that may
be considered a separate concern, less important/immediate than the
one i added above (as long as we can prove we can have a wrapper or
similar for these)

My opinion is that it may be valid to ask if it belongs at all to the
items that should be discussed as part of DAP until we have solved
those issues. Note that I'm not opposing to include this, just to make
sure first that it doesn't create problems in the long run with the
expected chartered activity of the group. For example: probably would
be good to see the experience of implementing a couple of the current
DAP API proposals in the Powerbox model

Would like to hear if you think this makes sense or if I am missing
something here

Saludos!

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2010Mar/att-0154/minutes-2010-03-16.html#item04

---
ricardo


-- 
Ricardo Varela  -  http://phobeo.com  -  http://twitter.com/phobeo
"Though this be madness, yet there's method in 't"

Received on Wednesday, 2 June 2010 11:17:04 UTC