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

a few random thoughts

* as Florian and others imply, neither W3C nor WhatWG are willing (for good reason) to promise to walk away if the other body is working in, or starts working in, a given area
* though we tend to speak of the other body as ‘them’, we are, in fact, for the most part one community (people work in both WhatWG and W3C);
* at the W3C, we’ve been trying hard over the last several years to reduce the motivation to have this dual-body system; more agility, better tooling, and so on; but some of the motivations are personal, historical, or intrinsic;

(One of the intrinsic issues we struggle with is the W3C’s historical insistence on accepting input from all ‘as equals', and the whatwg’s insistence on reflecting reality; we probably never will resolve what happens when the population and reality diverge — at least, it’s a problem societies, and political theorists, have struggled with for millennia).

I think both bodies should rightly be hesitant to pick up work started in the other, but there are reasons; I support Florian’s request to be clear what those reasons are when we do it. For HTML, I doubt we need to say a lot at W3C; it’s hard to imagine the consortium walking way from a foundational specification, and it deserves the patent policy coverage.

Another reason might be the need to get an imprimatur that is recognized by other standards bodies, regulators, and the like.



David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.



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