EME and MSE timeline

Philippe and I met F2F in Redmond this week to discuss the current status of work on the EME and MSE specifications.  Our conclusion is that we are making "slow and steady" progress on closing out the current issues and at developing CR test suites.  We have concluded that at this pace we will NOT ship our chartered deliverables on time.



Therefore we have decided that the only way to get both MSE and EME specifications to Recommendation status before Sep 30 2016 as described in the HME WG charter, is to make all future work completely "date driven".



The following is the HME WG timeline for MSE and EME that we plan to use.  This timeline is based on the HTML5.1 timeline [1] that is being used by the Web Platform WG whose charter also expires at the end of Sep 2016.  Philippe and I have added 2 weeks to the HTML5.1 timeline to give us the maximum possible time to deliver our Recommendations.



Target date for MSE and EME Recommendations: Sep 29 2016



Interim dates:

Thu Jun 9: Last "substantive change"s [3] to MSE and EME

Thu Jun 16: MSE Candidate Recommendation (CR) update; EME Working Draft update, CFC for EME and MSE CR (Jun 16-23)

Tue Jun 28: EME and MSE transition to CR request

Tue Jul  5: EME and MSE Candidate Recommendation publication

Tue Aug 2: CFC for EME and MSE Proposed Recommendations (Aug 2-9); MSE and EME implementation reports complete

Thu Aug 11: MSE and EME Proposed Recommendation transition request

Thu Aug 18: MSE and EME Proposed Recommendations to AC

Thu Sep 15: AC reviews end

Sep 19-23:  No W3C publications due to TPAC meetings

Sep 27: W3C Publications resume

Thu Sep 29: MSE and EME Recommendation publication

Fri Sep 30: Current HME WG charter ends



This "date driven" approach will likely have the following impacts.



a)      It will force most if not ALL new issues into VNext especially if these require "substantive changes" in order to ensure we stay on schedule.

b)     It will drive some unresolved V1 issues into VNext in order to ensure we stay on schedule.

c)      It will force us to delay some changes to VNext since adding the change no matter how small would mean that we will not be able to exit CR on time since we will not have implementations of the added features.

d)     We may even want to revisit some resolved V1 issues to ensure that their addition has not already made it impossible to exit CR as per the timeline.

e)     For some long standing issues especially those involving "substantive changes" where the HME WG is split on how to resolve the issue, as Chair I am going to have to declare a WG consensus decision [1] on whether material remains in the specification, is added to the specification or is removed in order for us to stay on schedule.  This may cause formal objections but that will be price we pay for staying on schedule.



Please feel free to contact me or Philippe directly if you want to discuss this "date driven" approach to shipping our Recommendations.  You are also welcome to respond to this email with any questions and/or comments.



/paulc

HME WG Chair



[1] http://www.w3.org/2015/Process-20150901/#Consensus

[2] https://www.w3.org/2016/05/10-html-editors-minutes.html#item11

[3] http://www.w3.org/2015/Process-20150901/#substantive-change