RE: W3C Polyfill service?

To some extent, the W3C’s investment in web-platform-tests is a similar thing—focused on getting interoperability through testing. What would be the goal of a polyfil repository? Would they count as an implementation of a feature? Could they also be used to help the testing effort? If so, then I would love to see them integrated into web-platform-tests.

(On a side note, I resorted to a polyfill to help test the DOM Parsing and Serialization spec—it proved very helpful for “debugging” the spec’s algorithms.)

From: Andrew Betts [mailto:andrew.betts@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 1:47 AM
To: www-tag@w3.org
Subject: W3C Polyfill service?

At a W3C Japan meeting in Tokyo yesterday, which I attended at Keio University, polyfills were mentioned frequently (I noticed this particularly because it was one of the few words I could understand when presentations were in Japanese).

Satoru Takagi from KDDI (a large mobile operator) subsequently suggested to me that W3C could provide an 'official' source of spec-compliant polyfills for new features (something like "polyfills.w3.org<http://polyfills.w3.org>"), and adopting polyfill.io<http://polyfill.io> as a starting point for this would seem to be a sensible approach.

His slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/totipalmate/svg2-candidate-recommendation-in-english


As the maintainer of polyfill.io<http://polyfill.io>, I'm open to this idea.  There's precedent for this in things like the validator services W3C operates, and there would likely be huge developer interest and adoption. W3C could bring governance and administration support to the project and the existing participants could continue to perform their existing roles.

I mentioned it to Mike Smith at the event, and he was skeptical, but I thought it worth asking if anyone thinks this is worth pursuing.

Cheers,

Andrew