New Charter for the HTML Working Group

All,

The W3C Director approved the following charter for the HTML Working
Group, through June 2015:
  http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-charter.html

The new charter includes:

 * An Dual License experiment for some specifications:
   http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-charter.html#documentlicense
 * The addition of the DOM4 specification

This announcement is the outcome of two charter reviews by the W3C
Membership (March and May 2013) and input from a number of individuals.
For changes since the May draft charter, see:
  http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-diff.html

During Member review of the May charter, there were 5 Formal Objections:

 * Four related to the Dual License Experiment
 * One related to the inclusion of playback of protected content
   within the charter scope.

Based on extensive discussions, the Director has decided to pursue the
Dual License experiment, pairing CC-BY with the W3C Document License.
The Director's view is that:

   * Despite concerns from some developers that it is not sufficiently
     liberal, CC-BY satisfies the key requirement of permitting the
     creation of derivative works.

   * A license with no attribution requirement, such as CC0, would
     not support other important W3C and community aims, as it could
     contribute to confusion rather than interoperability of the Web
     platform.

The Director will continue to review the impact of the experiment,
such as whether new work is brought to W3C, one of the metrics to
evaluate the experiment.

For more information about the Dual License experiment, see:
 http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-faq

There were various concerns by the EFF and individuals about the
charter including playback of protected content within its
scope. While we remain sensitive to the issues raised related to DRM
and usage control, the Director reconfirmed his earlier decision [1]
that the ongoing work is in scope. For more discussion of the topic,
see Jeff Jaffe's blog post [2].  The Director will continue to look at
community feedback regarding drafts published by the HTML Working
Group.

Philippe

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Feb/0122
[2] http://www.w3.org/blog/2013/05/perspectives-on-encrypted-medi/

-- 
Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org>. W3C Interaction Domain Lead
World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Monday, 30 September 2013 19:23:08 UTC