RE: Fast-track new people to areas www-style need the most help with

[Jon Rimmer:]
> 
> One thing I don't quite understand, despite having read this group for
> some time is how exactly editors are assigned to specs? Is there a formal
> process whereby say Tab applies to take over ownership of a module? What
> if that module already has an editor, but they're inactive? Is this
> decided informally between members? Does it have to wait 'til a F2F? How
> is ownership transferred, is it just a case of Fantasai or someone giving
> the appropriate CVS access?

It's approved by WG members; usually someone volunteers either implicitly - 
e.g. they submitted the spec - or explicitly because they want to take
over an abandoned module or agree to co-edit with the current owner. There
is no other special step you need to take once that has been resolved; source
control access is for all the modules. Once the WG agrees to you working on
something, you can edit it.

This can be decided on a weekly telcon or face-to-face. 

> 
> Also, I'd point out that any claim editor resource surpasses
> implementation resource seems a little dubious in light of what I posted
> about the other day [1], where Apple/Webkit are implementing an unfinished
> and unmaintained spec. 

I don't quite follow. Two points were made, as I recall: first, that editors are 
the scarcest resources i.e. feature requests > implementor bandwidth > editing 
capacity. The membership of this group is growing far faster than the number 
of active editors. Fwiw I think that's a good problem to have as it's a normal
consequence of success; I'd rather deal with that than the reverse!

Second, we would rather *prioritize* editor resources to features that have a decent
chance of being implemented in a reasonable amount of time. Do you have any reason
to assume this specific work was not started as a result of this process? If we do 
prioritize specs based on the level of interest of implementors, shouldn't implementation 
happen earlier rather than later? Is there any reason to think that sometimes work will
happen from a very early draft? We had an implementation of Grids before there was a first
public working draft, for instance.


>Although it seems people aren't too concerned about
> it? Despite it being exactly the kind of thing that leads to situations
> where standardisation of features like transitions and animations lags
> years behind implementations, authors rely on Webkit's implementation, and
> other vendors consider reverse-engineering and implementing -webkit
> properties. Things that everyone is always eager to point are very bad and
> shouldn't keep happening.

What makes you think there is no concern about it? Our last face-to-face began
with a 90mn discussion of this exact topic based on the long backlog of issues
filed in this mailing list against css3-animations and css3-transitions. The 
result of which was to assign new co-editors to the spec. This issue relates 
to the first point above (editing bottleneck). 

Also note that the larger complaint about Webkit features is not as much
about the ones that are specified lagging editing muscle - though that's painful as
fixing it is going to take an editing toll on other members - as much as the ones 
that were never submitted spreading all over the place (e.g. -webkit-text-size-adjust
on mobile). This area - widely used but 100% proprietary properties - is where other 
vendors are seriously considering jumping the prefix fence.
 
> Jon
> 
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Jan/0693.html
>

Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 16:43:15 UTC