Re: Web Notification Working Group Charter Extended

Hi Peter,

Peter Beverloo <beverloo@google.com>, 2015-05-19 18:25 +0100:
> Archived-At: <http://www.w3.org/mid/CALt3x6=g5yX+F7KmU+3ZN17JWs52RY_4HER-O-S2ubWQpVOsTg@mail.gmail.com>
> 
> Hello Jon,
> 
> Could you please share or summarize the notes of the transition call that
> led to the Candidate Recommendation to be published?
> 
> I would be interested to learn how the standing concerns (and Formal
> Objection) have been settled.

The summary is that on April 16th we (Jon as chair, Ted O’Connor as the acting
maintainer for the W3C spec, myself as W3C staff contact for the group, and
Philippe Le Hegaret as the domain lead for the W3C area where this group is
chartered) had the transition call with the W3C Director, Tim Berners-Lee.

We provided the Director with details on the concerns that had been expressed
to the transition request, and specifically, about the Formal Objection. (And
prior to the call I has also spent time talking with the Director myself about
details of the formal objection and concerns.)

After some discussion during the transition call, the outcome was that the
Director decided the spec could proceed to CR despite the formal objection.

The gist of the discussion is, first, it was noted that the nature of Formal
Objections is that they were (are) designed to be used only for genuine
emergencies. (An analogy that’s sometimes made is to the emergency stop
lever in the passenger car of a train, and pulling that lever amounts to
unilaterally stopping the whole train and everybody on it from proceeding
until the emergency situation is handled so that train can proceed again).

Another way to state it is that Formal objections are meant for cases where
some person or persons in a group see that a serious fatal error has been
made, and they’ve been unable to get others in the group to understand the
seriousness of it, or to get others in the group to listen at all and
fairly consider their point of view, and the only remedy they have left is
to escalate it to become an emergency the Director has to deal with.

So in the end, the response we got back from discussion with the Director on
this particular Formal Objection essentially was, There’s no emergency here.

But that’s not at all an exceptional response to get back about an FO on a
transition call. I’ve been on quite a few transition calls and I can
say that in my experience at least, “No emergency here.” is probably more
often than not the decision we end up getting back. That should not be
surprising if you consider what Formal Objections are designed for (as I
outlined above).

However, that’s not to say that significant discussion with the Director
about the substance of this Formal Objection and the related concerns did
not take place. Because it did take place. Quite a lot of actually (quite a
bit more than usual in fact, in my experience).

The one specific thing that we were asked to do in this case in relation to
the Formal Objection and other concerns was to make the document’s Status
section include a brief statement about the differences between this spec
and the https://notifications.spec.whatwg.org/ spec, and specifically about
the `onshow` and `onclose` events.

So I added the following paragraph to the Status section:

> A specification for Notifications is also being developed at
> https://notifications.spec.whatwg.org/. Recent work there has focused on
> integrating notifications with Service Workers and other new features.
> That specification also deprecates the onshow and onclose events that are
> present in this specification, under the rationale that those events lack
> sufficient use cases.

If anybody in the group has specific improvements to suggest to the language
of that paragraph, I’m very happy to help make improvements to it still. The
updated language would go into the Proposed Recommendation and the final the
Recommendation for the spec.

We’ve scheduled the transition to PR for June 19, so we have several weeks
in which the group can still have discussions and get some resolution on
improved language (if any) to propose.

  —Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith https://people.w3.org/mike