Re: [CSS21] WG process - next steps for CSS21?

On Mar 2, 2011, at 10:56 PM, Peter Moulder wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 03, 2011 at 03:48:49AM +0000, Linss, Peter wrote:
> 
>> The issues list we're paying attention to is at:
>> http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/css2.1
>> 
>> If there are issues that you know about that aren't on that list,
>> please let us know ASAP (and not a simple statement, like "I know of
>> more issues", give us concrete pointers) so we can have the list up to
>> date before our F2F.
> 
> The messages from the public sent during the working draft comments
> period don't yet appear on http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/css2.1 as far as
> I can see.
> 
> Note that a handful had a subject line with "[CSS 2.1]" rather than the
> requested "[CSS21]"; though I didn't notice any other variations
> on that sent during the working draft comment period.
> 
> In particular, we can reasonably assume that messages whose subject
> contains `wd' or `working draft' (ignoring case) contain what the sender
> considers to be an issue.
> 
> Is that a concrete enough pointer, or are individual message URLs needed?

Sorry, no, that's not concrete enough. 

We already know to scan the list, what would be helpful is more sets of eyes finding the right messages, reading them, making sure they're not duplicates, etc.

Please send individual URLs, and not for every 2.1 issue you find, only those missing from our list. We don't need more traffic, we need help filtering existing traffic.

> 
> 
> Anton Prowse also mentions that
> 
>> There are *lots* of issues which were raised when the spec was CR
>> that haven't been filed on the issues list
> 
> This is something I don't understand very well: the w3 pages say that
> 
>  W3C welcomes review of specifications from the moment they are first
>  published until just before they are published as standards
> 
> and goes on to invite readers to "report a bug" to the place indicated by 
> the "Status Section" of the document (namely www-style in the case of
> CSS21).
> 
> As Anton notes, there are many such comments have duly been sent to
> www-style where an issue hasn't so far been created in the main CSS2.1
> issues list.
> 
> Are such messages eligible to be considered as "issues raised about the
> document since the previous step" or not?  More generally, what counts as
> an "issue raised about the document since the previous step" ?

Yes, messages to www-style (with reasonable tags to identify them) are sufficient to raise an issue.

If there are issues missing from our list, it's not because we don't care, or don't look. It's just that there's a LOT of traffic on this list and we're only human. Sometimes things get missed, we do our best. Please help.

> 
> 
>> CSS 2.1 has been in the pipeline for far too long, many other specs
>> normatively depend on it and it needs to be a REC to unblock progress in
>> other areas. 
> 
> What other specs are those, and what bits of CSS2.1 do they depend on?

How about every other CSS module? EPUB? There are many others, listing them isn't the point, there are dependencies, period. We need to move  2.1 forward and stop futzing with it. It'll never be perfect, that's what errata are for.

> The main other spec I'm aware of is SVG, though it doesn't actually use
> much from CSS beyond parsing and cascading.  It does use a few individual
> properties like color and font-related properties, but doesn't use the
> box model stuff.
> 
> This is significant, because most of the problems with the current CSS
> 2.1 text are in areas that SVG doesn't actually need.
> 
> Knowing what the dependencies are might help us concentrate on what
> actually matters to other specs.

No, identifying dependencies on areas of the spec isn't helpful at all. The entire spec needs to move forward. Identifying areas to focus on would only help if we were going to break CSS2.1 into modules that could advance individually, and we're not going to do that.

Received on Thursday, 3 March 2011 08:02:45 UTC