Process lessons from Web Performance? Re: publishing new WD of URL spec

> this sort of thing happens a lot.   It's the nature of the process...
Thanks for steering this thread in a more actionable direction.  I think most people in the AB and the Process CG agree that W3C needs to get more agile.  The "waterfall" model that seems to have guided the traditional W3C process assumed that the spec was correct and implementations should follow it.  We're trying to move toward a more modern conception of tight feedback loops between requirements, specs, implementations, documentation, and broad community requirements.  We're not there yet.

The  "living standard" model (at least earlier in the history of WHATWG, and as I understood it) posited that what the implementations in some sense defined real standard and the spec should evolve to describe that reality.  I personally think that was a useful way to look at the situation in say the 2007-2012 timeframe. But going forward, such a perspective  gives most of the decision making power to browser implementers when ideally other communities -- most notably, real website / web app developers, not to mention the accessibility, internationalization, security, etc. specialists  -- need to have a seat at the table as well.

It would be great to get specific bug reports on what in the process document,  or the way it is implemented by WGs and the W3C staff,  is broken but fixable.  A post-mortem on the Web Performance experience might be a valuable source of such bug reports.  But we should also be thinking about situations such as responsive images (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/how-a-new-html-element-will-make-the-web-faster/) where neither WHATWG nor W3C come out looking pristine. 
________________________________________
From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2014 7:17 AM
To: Philippe Le Hegaret
Cc: public-w3process@w3.org
Subject: Re: publishing new WD of URL spec

On 9/11/14, 10:06 AM, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
> ie good idea but we'll push it for v2:

For what it's worth, this is pretty much a perfect illustration of
what's wrong with the W3C process and its versioning from my point of
view...  An implementor comes to the WG saying the spec is not
web-compatible, during the time period that is supposed to be for
implementor feedback, and the decision is to freeze the spec as-is and
push off making it web-compatible to a nebulous v2.

To be clear, I'm not trying to call out the webperf working group in
particular here; this sort of thing happens a lot.  It's the nature of
the process...

> I raised the issue to make sure it stays in our radar and get resolved
> once and for all:
>   http://www.w3.org/2010/webperf/track/issues/18

Thank you!

-Boris

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2014 22:04:43 UTC