Re: Reminder regarding normative references

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Wendy Seltzer <wseltzer@w3.org> wrote:

> A reminder that has come up in some recent transition calls: When moving
> a spec to Candidate Recommendation, we look to see that the normative
> references are to documents of equivalent stability[1] -- ideally, also
> CR, if they're W3C documents. So if you're moving a document forward,
> it's a good idea to look periodically at the references and ping the
> other working groups where those are being developed to make sure that
> dependencies are moving at the pace we need. (This also helps to satisfy
> the "wide review" requirements.)
>

A corollary to this is that "stability" should be balanced against
"accuracy". That is, http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
is pretty stable, but we ought not reference it today, as it doesn't
represent what browsers are doing.

What do you/the director/his delegates suggest that we do if we'd like to
reference concepts that aren't yet present in W3C specifications?

As a concrete example, I'm going to send a transition request for Secure
Contexts shortly. It uses the "creation URL" concept which was recently
added to WHATWG's HTML (
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#creation-url). That
concept is not present in the W3C's HTML (nor is it clear to me how to get
it added :) ). How do you suggest that we proceed?

+public-webapps, as I believe specs like Service Worker have similar
problems (and, in this case, the exact same problem).

-mike