Re: Proposal to work on Geolocation

Hi, Ian-

Ian Hickson wrote (on 5/27/08 7:38 PM):
> On Tue, 27 May 2008, Doug Schepers wrote:
>> 
>> 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". 

Hey, it's only a week more than your original proposal. :)


> 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.

Sure, agreed as a general sentiment.  But honestly, is there some time 
pressure such that an extra week or two will cause serious problems? 
Vendors have been working in this space for many, many years (especially 
in Japan) and there are already tons of patents and different 
approaches... is there some particular issue that has more urgency than 
is generally known, which you'd care to share?  Or more likely, is it a 
case of momentum (which is certainly enough for me)?


> 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?

I don't see why not.  I have some meager thoughts on it myself, having 
spent some time reading up on it recently.


> 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.

Sure, makes sense.  In that light, it's not a burden on Google to work 
in a different WG, if that's what ends up happening.


> Having said that, I personally do think it would be wiser to keep all DOM 
> APIs intended for browsers in one working group. 

That was my initial impetus for proposing it in the draft charter.


> 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.

I don't think that's the case here.  I, for one, would not want all DOM 
interface work done in the HTML WG, nor would you want it all done in 
the SVG WG.  There is a sane level of separation of concerns that 
benefits all parties.

Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG, CDF, and WebAPI

Received on Wednesday, 28 May 2008 00:09:49 UTC