Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Early design review for the Topics API (Issue #726)

There are two sides of the Topics API: the interface it exposes to pages to tell them what topics a user is probably interested in, and the interface it exposes to users to figure out or guess what topics they're actually interested in. The interface with pages is the traditional realm of web standards and involves a bunch of tradeoffs around the rate that pages can identify users, which @martinthomson has focused on above.

On the other hand, the interface with users is not generally something that we standardize or specify, instead giving user agents wide freedom to do what's best for their users, even if that's very different from what other UAs do. There are some limits here—if pages need to adapt to particular UI, it may be worth constraining the variation—but I don't think Topics falls into that category, and I suspect that the Topics spec actually has too much normative text specifying the user-facing part of its behavior.

Unfortunately, a large fraction of the [TAG's review](https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/726#issuecomment-1612522047) that @plinss recounted focuses on the particular UI that Chrome plans to ship, rather than the question of whether UAs have the freedom to do the right thing for their users. The TAG suggests that many users would appreciate if their interests were "entirely configured by the user in their browser settings", and I agree. As far as I can see, this UI is completely supported by the Topics API and would require no changes to the page-facing API or page behavior. Whether or not Chrome initially ships that UI, other browsers can do so, and Chrome could switch to it in the future. If I'm wrong, and that UI would require changes to the page-facing API, that would be a really good thing to point out soon, so that Chrome can ship a more-compatible API instead.

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