Re: Draft [URL] reference update to informative text

On 10/9/14 5:06 PM, Domenic Denicola wrote:
> From: Sam Ruby [mailto:rubys@intertwingly.net]
>
>> I appreciate that you have other things to do; meanwhile what would you suggest for people who do have time to contribute and would very much like to see the specification more accurately reflect what works?
>
> I can't speak for Anne, but personally, my strategy would be:
>
> 1. Figure out what modifications it would take to the parsing algorithm to make your hot pink rows into pale green or gold. Unless they are *exceedingly* complicated, I imagine Anne would accept a pull request for those.
> 2. Start submitting patches to browsers in order to get the pale red rows to match the URL standard.
> 3. Alternate between these two activities based on how many rows in the table you can manage to fix with one pull request or patch.

Since it has been excerpted away, the color definitions can be found here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2014Oct/0024.html

And the latest result here:

http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/urltest-results/

---

Domenic, what you describe indeed does describe the way I would like to 
proceed.  And based on the people I met with this past week at TPAC -- 
including members of the TAG, AC, AB, employees of browser vendors, 
people who would primarily describe themselves as members of the WHATWG, 
and people who would primarily describe themselves as members of the IETF.

I would like to work with *ALL* of them.

My problem is that my read is that Anne feels that this contradicts 
"most WHATWG work", and "it's just not what we do".  You can read his 
actual words in context here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2014Nov/0004.html

I think he may be overstating his case, particularly as I have 
traditionally seen much of the value proposition for the WHATWG to be 
something along the lines of "we reverse engineer so that you don't have 
to".  Be that as it may, I would be willing to accept that this is not 
the way that Anne would like to work or what he does.

I'm not going to mince words as I want to get quickly back to the work 
of defining behavior that user agents -- including browser vendors and 
web servers and libraries alike[1] -- would be willing to converge to.

Anne has repeatedly described his effort as something that hasn't 
attracted sufficient implementer interest, something that he doesn't 
have bandwidth for at the moment, and something for which a large 
portion of the spec is in need of a rewrite.

By contrast, I seem to be having no problems attracting implementer 
interest, I believe that I have demonstrated that I have bandwidth, and 
have now written a substantial portion of a proposed replacement.

I have also made it very clear to everybody that venue choice is not a 
primary consideration for me.  If this work is welcome at the WHATWG, I 
would glad to do it there.  If it is not, then I will work wherever I am 
welcome.

I can't emphasize this enough: it truly matters not to me.  I am 
producing a specification draft using bikeshed.  With a few lines of 
metadata change, I would be building a W3C Working Draft instead of a 
WHATWG Living Standard, with all of the patent and copyright 
implications that would come with such a change.  But as venue choice 
isn't a primary consideration for me, that wouldn't be a problem for me.

The two efforts would not largely share spec text.  In fact, outside of 
the names of external interfaces and the small amount of WebIDL that 
this specification defines, I don't see a need for overlap.

What would be true, however, is that the behavior that user agents would 
be expected to comply with would differ substantially.  My expectation 
is that the expected behavior would match where it comes to matching the 
realities of deployed content, but would diverge when it comes to 
matching what user agents do or would be willing to do.

Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated, as I don't want to 
spend further time on politics, I would much rather be focusing on 
convergence and interop.

- Sam Ruby

[1] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2014Nov/0004.html

Received on Saturday, 1 November 2014 19:57:26 UTC