Re: Can we get consensus on what incubation means (was: Re: WICG Incubation vs CSSWG Process)

On 01/06/2017 12:20 AM, Florian Rivoal wrote:
>
>> On Jan 4, 2017, at 06:14, Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com> wrote:
>
>
>>  • However, there's a key feature that is missing there, that I went into at some length at TPAC - incubation has to enable graceful failure.
>
> I think it would help to have a more explicit way of distinguishing within the "exploring" part things that:
> 1 - are under active development with broad participation
> 2 - look like reasonably good ideas to everyone, but lack momentum and are unlikely to progress without more active participation

This is everything that hasn't been updated lately and isn't #3. :)

> 3 - things that are now recognized by most as failed experiments

As I've mentioned already, the CSSWG's drafts were all audited last year and are marked as such (or should be if the action 
items to publish were followed through--I think they were, though I didn't personally check).

>> Once a spec is published by a WG as an official working draft, it takes on a life of its own – the team will expect it to progress, chairs/editors will feel responsible for advancing it and resolving issues, so it is hard to admit failure.

I haven't seen this problem in the CSSWG. If it's considered a failure, we aren't afraid to admit it. See above.

> The current CSSWG policy of "allowing" things to go in productions only once the spec reaches CR is in my view merely a blunt attempt at doing what the "Interoperability and Compatibility Risk" part of Blink's intent to ship aims to do.
>
> Changing that WG policy to either the spec being in CR *or* sending the WG an intent to ship (preceded by an intent to implement?) with an assessment of Interoperability and Compatibility Risk would seem like a good idea to me.

We already have a policy that allows for exceptions to CR *if* it has the broad consensus of the CSSWG that it's appropriate 
to do so. I think this is much better than a policy that merely requires a vendor to make some kind of unilateral announcement 
based on whatever they feel like, without any attempt to get either feedback or consensus.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 9 January 2017 18:08:15 UTC