Comment tracking for navigation-timing CR [Was: Re: publishing new WD of URL spec]

[ Just changing the Subject; please `carry on` ... ]

On 9/11/14 8:46 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 9/11/14, 5:50 AM, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
>> Unless we missed it, I don't think that we ignored the feedback.
>
> The working group sure did. 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/2012Jun/0003.html 
> is the relevant feedback.  This was implementor feedback during the CR 
> period, and very definitely ignored.
>
>> 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.
>
> What happened is that explicit implementor feedback about the spec not 
> being compatible with either implementations or what developers wanted 
> was provided during CR and ignored.  There wasn't any decision; there 
> wasn't any discussion I'm aware of, there weren't any replies to the 
> feedback, nothing.  Pretty normal, all of it.
>
>> 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
>
> This report only tested the things in the spec, not the things that 
> should have been in the spec but weren't.  Convenient.  ;)
>
>> 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.
>
> While true, the fact that you have to have a whole new specification 
> level, taking years, to add a single line of IDL that was requested 
> over two years ago, complete with the editors having not clue and not 
> reading the previous mails on the topic (see thread starting 
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/2014Aug/0000.html>) 
> is precisely the thing that makes the W3C so frustrating for me to 
> work with as an implementor.  It basically means the W3C specs are 
> near-useless as a guide to implementation, and instead I have to go 
> reverse-engineer other browsers when implementing.
>
>> 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)
>
> Adding stringifiers to this family of interfaces is not a matter of 
> "cycles": it's a trivial job.  It's a matter of policy and will to 
> actually have your specs be useful to implementors.
>
> This is why servo is relying on the WHATWG specs, not the W3C ones, by 
> the way.  They tried using the latter and discovered that this led to 
> them having implementations of things that are not web-compatible. 
> Needless to say, this is not helpful when trying to write a browser 
> engine.
>
> -Boris
>

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2014 12:58:03 UTC