Re: Proposal to work on Geolocation

On Tue, 27 May 2008, Doug Schepers wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote (on 5/27/08 6:09 PM):
> > On Tue, 27 May 2008, Doug Schepers wrote:
> > > 
> > > The W3C intends to follow through on that, and to allocate Team 
> > > resources to this valuable technology.  We will announce something 
> > > formal soon.
> > > 
> > > Rest assured that Mike and I are intent on ensuring that there is no 
> > > scope creep for this API, and that the Geolocation API WG will take 
> > > a pragmatic, vendor-aware approach, and will act quickly.
> > 
> > Sure, the proposal to work in the Web API working group is only 
> > intended to be a stop-gap measure while we wait for the wheels of the 
> > W3C to turn. It would be sad to delay this while we wait for charters 
> > to be written and so forth.
> 
> That's a very reasonable concern.  Since we are hoping for the WebApps 
> WG to be chartered as soon as we hear back from the AC reps (hopefully a 
> couple of weeks or less), it may not be appropriate to do it here...

To clarify, we do consider two weeks to be a "wait". To be honest we're 
worried that with vendors already working on products that do Geolocation 
stuff, we may have waited too long already. The sooner we can get people 
together to discuss this the better.

In fact, would it be possible to unofficially use this mailing list to 
discuss proposals while we wait for a formal decision from Chaals on 
whether Geolocation can (even temporarily) be a WebAPI work item?


> Regarding proposed deliverables in general, I've provided a mechanism 
> for that which I hope will be more agile, while providing due 
> oversight... rather than rechartering the WG, we can merely present a 
> proposal to the AC (based on initial use cases, requirements, research, 
> etc.), and formally add it to our list of deliverables upon approval.  
> I anticipate steady progress in this group, so as we free up resources, 
> we should keep looking forward for useful things that we can work on.

FWIW, the resources Google has to offer here aren't locked to working 
groups, they're locked to work items. So insofar as Google is concerned, 
it would make no difference if there was one group or ten, we'd have the 
same amount of resources. The list of deliverables that matters is the 
total of all the deliverables we're interested in, not the deliverables 
that a particular working group is tasked to work on.

Having said that, I personally do think it would be wiser to keep all DOM 
APIs intended for browsers in one working group. The confusion we had with 
two working groups (WebAPI and WAF) led to us merging them, it would be 
sad to then immediately forget the lesson we had learnt and split work up 
again.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2008 23:40:03 UTC