[wbs] response to 'Call for Review: Sustainable Web Working Group Charter Charter'

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Call for Review:
Sustainable Web Working Group Charter Charter' (Advisory Committee) for
Mozilla Foundation by Tantek Çelik.


The reviewer's organization opposes this Charter and requests that this
group not be created [Formal Objection].

Additional comments about the proposal:
   This was originally a short, prompt response posted within days of this
poll opening, updated iteratively, with some points written up as specific
GitHub issues, while we wrote up a more thorough response. If you see poll
responses above (seemingly previous to) this one that refer to it, that's
why.


Mozilla has long been an outspoken supporter of sustainability (s12y)
considerations and concerns in web standards, often speaking first (and
being met with opposition), from our Formal Objection to the DID
Recommendation (which was overridden without actually handling our
objections) to founding the Sustainability CG and kicking off broader
discussions such as what would s12y horizontal review look like etc.

We are very encouraged with the development of the Web Sustainability
Guidelines (WSG) 1.0, and strongly support its continued evolution.


In summary: we believe that there is a much greater chance of success
(achieving the goals of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) faster and
more impactfully) by pursuing this work in a chartered public Interest
Group instead of a Working Group with custom Success Criteria for a WSG
Statement and have filed the following public issues accordingly: 

https://github.com/w3c/sustyweb/issues/105
https://github.com/w3c/sustyweb/issues/106



First, the problem with this proposed Working Group is that it is the wrong
tool for the job (thus Formal Objection, request that this Working Group
not be created), and seems to show a misunderstanding (or at least
disagreement) of what Working Groups are for, what Recommendations are for
(interoperable implementations), and in this regard potentially
demonstrates a larger problem of lack of such understanding or perhaps
consensus in our opinion that may need addressing by the Process CG or
perhaps the AB (issues to be filed accordingly to improve the Process
and/or Guide accordingly which is out of scope for this poll).

We believe that there is a much greater chance of success (achieving the
goals of the WSG faster and more impactfully) by pursuing this work in a
chartered public Interest Group instead and have filed the following public
issue accordingly: 

https://github.com/w3c/sustyweb/issues/105


Second, this WG charter contains the boiler-plate "Success Criteria"
https://www.w3.org/2024/06/sustyweb-charter-202406.html#success-criteria
which though excellent for creating strictly technical specifications
intended for interoperable implementations that users can choose and use,
and are far more strict than necessary for the WSG, and may instead have
the unintended consequence of removing helpful guidance that otherwise
cannot pass that high bar of interoperable implementations.

Guidelines, no matter how well intended/supported, are not the basis for
developing interoperable implementations (the whole purpose of a Working
Group), via a test suite or otherwise.

The WSG is a set of guidelines, some technical, for a combination of humans
to follow (humans following steps is not an "implementation") and perhaps
some amount of (semi-)automated testing tools which users can choose from,
however are not expected to directly interoperate with each other. 

By definition you can't "validate" a single website or implementation or
even a single class of implementations such as testing/validation tools as
"interoperable".

Interoperability is something that occurs directly *between* two or more
implementations, typically of acting as complementary classes of
implementations, such as protocol senders/receivers or format
readers/writers or clients/servers.

While the WSG is a valuable and encouraging document, it is not a technical
specification for implementation, test suites, and testing interoperability
across complementary implementations, and it's inappropriate (potentially
harmful to the development of the WSG) to pretend that it is.

We suggest custom Success Criteria be written for a Sustainable Web
(SustyWeb) IG (assuming issue 105 linked above is accepted), and a WSG
Statement:

https://github.com/w3c/sustyweb/issues/106



We request the Team withdraw this proposed Working Group charter
accordingly, and instead write a new Interest Group (IG) charter with the
same deliverable(s), write custom (not boiler-plate) "Success Criteria"
that are appropriate for encouraging a high quality and maximally impactful
WSG, and then propose that new Sustainable Web Interest Group charter to
the AC.

We want to see the WSG succeed, as maximally as possible, as soon as
possible, and we believe an officially chartered IG with the goal of
publishing a WSG Statement is the best path forward for that objective.

My organization would be interested in participating in a SustyWeb IG.

Thanks for your consideration.


Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/sustyweb-2024/ until 2024-07-22.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer

Received on Tuesday, 23 July 2024 03:15:03 UTC