Re: [w3c/charter-html] Charter must state a reason when duplicating work done elsewhere (#139)

" I strongly suspect that one of the reasons we have not written it down is that different people have different rationales for this, and these various goals are mutually incompatible."

That may well be true.  One possible rationale for the WP WG taking on specs that WHATWG is developing upstream is to get the broad patent commitments that come with W3C Recommendations.  Until such a time that WHATWG operates under an IPR policy that generated credible royalty-free patent commitments, this is a defensible reason for duplicating the specs.  But I'm not sure folks on the W3C side would agree this is the main value add from the W3C version of HTML, DOM, etc. And I'm pretty sure folks on the WHATWG side don't consider this a sufficient reason for the duplication.   But the larger community benefits from the outcome of this inefficient and error-prone system so long as people look to the Living Standards as the up-to-date version and the W3C versions as a guide to what has binding patent commitments.  
 
In a better world than the one we currently live in, WHATWG Living Standards would have patent commitments, and W3C Recommendations would be efficiently maintained to accurately reflect how the web works today, and the two communities would work out some sort of division of labor to prevent duplication of work.  I can dream can't I ? :-) 


-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/w3c/charter-html/issues/139#issuecomment-301676432