Re: CR exit criteria and features at risk for HTML5

On Aug 16, 2012, at 7:12 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU> wrote:

> 
> Well, I'll be honest.  I don't see the value of REC as currently set up.  Which is why I'm asking for someone to explain it to me, please.  How we move towards REC really depends on what the goal of a REC is, and _that_ is what I'm trying to understand in this context.  In terms of browser interop, a REC for something unmodularized the size of "HTML" is somewhat pointless as far as I can tell; the really important part for interop is stabilizing the spec text to a large degree and implementations converging on it.  So presumably having a REC has some other goals.  What are those goals?

I haven't heard from anyone else explicitly from the W3C leadership they believe pushing to REC quickly is valuable. However, so far as I know, reaching the Recommendation maturity level has the following set of effects:

(1) Signal to the broader community that work on the specification is done. 
(2) Greater willingness to cite or reference the spec, for those who consider the formal maturity level important.
(3) Patent commitments come fully into effect; the RF license obligation technically only applies once the spec hits REC.
(4) Some level of interoperability improvement and reality check happens, depending on the CR exit criteria and the quality of the test suite.
(5) It becomes somewhat more cumbersome to change the document if problems are identified.

In general, it seems good for (1)-(3) to happen quickly. The "permissive" proposed set of CR exit criteria would make them happen faster. The tradeoff is doing less of (4), and therefore perhaps suffering the consequences of (5) more keenly.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2012 17:40:54 UTC