Proposed standards evolutionary lifecycle

How things go from idea to standard/rec in my ideal world.. Clint and I
were discussing this yesterday and it has apparently never been articulated
by me, so I'd like to share it here...

* someone has an idea

* they create a proposal and send it to the list for early comment

* if they are still interested, they turn that into an unofficial draft
(there are templates to unofficial drafts that look like this
http://fremycompany.com/TR/2012/ED-css-custom/) and send it to the list -
ideally along with a draft, but I suppose that some may post drafts hoping
someone else will implement.

* Once we have a versioned implementation and draft - that's a prollyfill.
It gets an initial review, gets added to the list..

*  It may change, spawn forks and variants, etc.  It might be helpful to
encourage that these be referenced right off the site during development or
something (we can place a CDN like cloudflare in front of it) to allow us
to get some idea about how any people are using..

*  It gets tested heavily - algorithms worked out, etc with test suites.

* If it gets mature and seems to have a lot of support/traction we submit
it for consideration and lobby for it.

* It gets a legitimate draft in the appropriate body (most often that would
be W3C I think, but ECMA might be another)

* At this point, if we have been able to keep W3C members reasonably up to
date, the normal process to real standard and implementation should be
simple, relatively uneventful and fast.

-- 
Brian Kardell :: @briankardell :: hitchjs.com