Policy framework (was: Rechartering Device APIs & Policy Working Group)

Hi,

On Feb 2, 2011, at 17:04 , Bryan Sullivan wrote:
> - A policy framework that would allow using the defined APIs into a different security environment than the default browser context

Where the policy framework is concerned, I first have to point out that the group has already resolved not to work on it. Reopening that discussion is going to require information that was not available to us at that time.

But much more importantly, I've been talking to a lot of people about this over the past few months, and 100% of the support I have heard for this has come from the mobile industry. Conversely, 100% of the other stakeholders were against it.

To me this indicates that this is not a technology that, at this point, is justified in being standardised in a consortium that spans all the industries that the Web covers. Not all technologies need to be universal. It would be weird to see W3C specifying radio protocols for 5G communication. There is nothing wrong about vertical requirements being standardised in vertical organisations.

It's not a numbers game, it doesn't matter how big this or that industry is. It doesn't matter how many implementers there are if they're all in the same industry — I can find quite a few 3G chipset implementers, but that wouldn't make it a good idea for DAP to write standards for that. It's about working everywhere. DAP is part of the Ubiquitous Web Activity — that should signal something.

So unless we see a large enough body of support for this coming from outside the mobile industry, I really don't see how this could stay on charter. Maybe it'll be back in a future group, when more experimentation has been conducted, when there are novel ideas about how to approach the issue that have been shown to make sense in a broader context. But that's hardly the case now.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Monday, 7 February 2011 11:46:28 UTC