Re: Discussion of "incompatibilities" at the F2F

Hi John,

> It appears from the F2F agenda that we will be spending 2.5
> hours on "Current incompatibilities between implementations."

Exactly, after sending the first draft of the agenda some implementers
suggested that it would be helpful to have a timeslot to discuss about
incompatibilities between existing implementations. The chairs
discussed this proposal and decided to add this point for the first
day of the meeting. We haven't received any other proposal to change
the agenda so far.

This was discussed in the members mailing list in the next e-mails:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-geolocation/2009Oct/0000.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-geolocation/2009Oct/0001.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-geolocation/2009Oct/0002.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-geolocation/2009Oct/0003.html


>  The fact that this is on the agenda for a substantial length
> of time certainly
> implies:
>
> 1) that there are such incompatibilities, and
> 2) that the browser makers have had at least some discussions
> of these incompatibilities (or else it would not have ended
> up on the agenda)

Sorry but I couldn't share this assumption. The fact is that the
Geolocation API has been widely implemented despite the fact that we
still are on a relatively early stage of the process. Anyone can use
the API with one of the existing implementations (Mozilla Firefox,
Google Gears, iPhone, Opera,...) and test it on their own by writing a
web application or test case without having special agreements with
the implementers because everything is public.

As a prove of this, please check the mail sent by Dominique
Hazael-Massieux, someone that is not suspicious of having parallel
talks with implementers of the spec, who generated some test cases and
posted some incompatibilities in Firefox and the iPhone two days ago
in the public mailing list.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2009Oct/0007.html

>
> There has, however, been no hint or mention of
> incompatibilities on the W3C mailing list. This is
> consistent with the historical pattern in this WG, where most
> substantive discussions happen somewhere else other than on
> the WG list.
>

Well, we don't really know what do you mean with this "historical
pattern in this WG", if you are thinking in some specific issue that
was not properly discussed within the group please let us know and we
will try to clarify it.

> As a courtesy to WG members who are attending the F2F, it
> would be helpful if someone could summarize for the list the
> incompatibilities that we will be discussing.  More
> generally, if there are other facts, developments, or
> discussions about other topics that will be discussed at the
> F2F that have not previously been mentioned or discussed on
> the list, it would be appropriate to share that information
> with the list before the F2F.

I could agree on this last point, we encourage people testing the spec
to post any incompatibility issue they found in the public mailing
list or even opening a new item in issue tracker.

Thanks,

Angel

Received on Friday, 30 October 2009 10:12:16 UTC