- From: Chris Mills <cmills@opera.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 08:45:52 +0000
- To: Janet Swisher <jswisher@mozilla.com>
- Cc: public-webplatform@w3.org
On 8 Dec 2012, at 00:00, Janet Swisher <jswisher@mozilla.com> wrote: > Starting a new thread, as suggested. If there's interest, we can discuss in a Content call. > > I'd like if we could define these categories as objectively as possible. "Stable" is a useful concept for web developers, but hard to pin down. Technologies with the same official standardization status can vary widely in their level of stability (rate of change). Any ideas on how to tackle that? This is so hard to define, but we should probably try to define a set of guidelines, something like It is counted as stable if * It is as old as the hills and supported across all browsers ever. The <p> element, for example * It has at least two compatible implementations, and you can easily polyfill the rest, matchMedia springs to mind. > > Of the values listed on http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:Standardization_Status I'd like to collapse "Experimental" into "Non-Standard". "Aim to one day be a standard" is not a property of a technology; it is an intention of an organization of human beings, and therefore prone to politics. Therefore, I suggest using "Non-standard" for anything that can be freely used, and doesn't have at least two compatible implementations. The intentions of the proposing organization can be explained on the overview page for the technology. Yeah, I'd agree with this. > > I would define "Proprietary" as something that has restrictions on its use (such as patent liability or a required, non-openly-licensed toolkit); things in this category are generally not considered appropriate for this site. Didn't we say that we'd accept submissions on such technologies, as long as they were clearly put in a separate section and marked, away from real standards? I'm happy either way really. > > On 12/5/12 6:17 PM, Alex Komoroske wrote: >> I'm all for clearly calling out this information on listing pages and on the page itself. Before the public announcement we had plans to style the standardization status flag appropriately on the page itself, but never got around to it. Ideally some of our design-inclined participants will chime in on this specific styling. >> >> Michael, the question of what the different standardization statuses are is a difficult issue and deserves its own thread (or topic at a content meeting). The current list of statuses is at http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:Standardization_Status . >> >> On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com> wrote: >> The appearance looks fine, but there’s a continuum from “non-standard” to “standard” that might need some discussion. Off the top of my head, there’s: >> >> - Totally proprietary, never offered for standardization and without any sort of IPR commitment >> >> - Not offered for standardization but for which there are some royalty-free patent commitments (VP8 might be an example) >> >> - Offered for standardization but ended up as W3C Notes rather than standards (Web SQL API comes to mind) >> >> - On a standards track but not stable yet >> >> - Stable spec that is (or is likely to be) standardized in more or less its current form (e.g HTML5, 2D Canvas, etc.) >> >> >> That’s probably to fine-grained for WPD’s purposes, but I’d think that at least 3 categories are needed, something like: >> >> - Proprietary >> >> - Draft Standard >> >> - Stable Standard >> >> > > -- > Janet Swisher > Mozilla Developer Network > Technical Writer/Community Steward
Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2012 08:46:34 UTC