RE: updated editor's draft of the Geolocation API specification

WRT process:
The question is whether standardization process is to document what the implementations do based on some earlier versions of the WD/ED, or whether it is to create something that builds upon the experiences from the existing implementations. The below statements mean to me that currently the first assumption from the above is our case.
Versioning is related to the above question.

Marcin Hanclik
ACCESS Systems Germany GmbH
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-----Original Message-----
From: public-geolocation-request@w3.org [mailto:public-geolocation-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Andrei Popescu
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009 9:08 PM
To: Richard Barnes
Cc: Lars Erik Bolstad; public-geolocation
Subject: Re: updated editor's draft of the Geolocation API specification

Hi Richard,

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Richard Barnes<rbarnes@bbn.com> wrote:
>>> The alternative, of course, is to explicitly agree that V1 is just going
>>> to
>>> be a documentation of what implementations are doing now, and reserve
>>> "what
>>> we really have consensus on" for V2.
>>>
>>
>> Sounds reasonable to me. Nobody claims we have reached perfection, so
>> V2 is very much needed.
>
> For those watching process, though, it's noteworthy that saying that there
> is consensus "Thid document says what implementations are doing now" is very
> different from saying "This document is what we think is the right thing to
> do."  In IETF partlance, the former would be an "Informational" RFC, while
> the second would be "Standards Track".
>

I disagree. "The right thing to do" has a time dimension attached to
it. A while ago, we had consensus that "the right thing to do" was to
have these attributes this way. As time passes, "the right thing to
do" may change (and it has changed, in this case), but we need to draw
the line somewhere. To me, drawing the line where the spec matches the
implementations is sensible.

> In other words, if a document only describes current practice, without WG
> consensus that it's good practice, then maybe it wouldn't make sense for
> that document to be a TR.  I don't know the W3C process well enough to
> suggest what else it might be (other than a basis for improvement toward
> consensus).
>

So you think this should not be a recommendation because the name of a
boolean is wrong and you'd rather have a spec that doesn't match any
existing implementation? How do you think developers will like that?

Thanks,
Andrei


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Received on Wednesday, 10 June 2009 08:57:09 UTC