Re: publishing new WD of URL spec

On Wed, 2014-09-10 at 21:48 -0400, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 9/10/14, 6:14 PM, Glenn Adams wrote:
> > and they do not follow a consensus process.
> 
> Glenn, with all due respect, neither do many W3C specifications.  Case 
> in point is http://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/ which managed to get 
> to REC while ignoring feedback that pointed out that not a single 
> implementation actually matched the specification (including the ones 
> produced by the employers of the editors).  And this wasn't because the 
> implementations were buggy, but because the specification was incomplete.

Unless we missed it, I don't think that we ignored the feedback. Without
doing a deep search in the history here, I'm guessing that what happened
here was that webperf decided to ship the spec while leaving some part
incomplete/undefined. But we published a report at the time about the 
implementations and tried to make it as complete as possible:
 http://www.w3.org/2012/04/navigation_timing_cr_results.html

> Of course now that it's a REC getting it fixed is a major production; 
> given that it didn't happen back when it should have I have no hope of 
> it happening now.
>
> This is hardly an isolated incident with W3C specifications.  In fact, 
> and very unfortunately, it's the most common thing I see happening.

Most (all?) specifications have a list of issues where some of them are
known to take years to resolve and make them incomplete in some ways.
It's an iterative process. The Group has been working on Navigation
Timing 2 since then with the intent of replacing the first version of
Navigation Timing. Granted, we're not moving fast on Navigation Timing 2
and that's frustrating for some (and I share some of the blame for that
due to lack of cycles), but it's not like we don't have issues around it
either.

Philippe

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2014 09:51:03 UTC