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WebStandardsFuture / browser-engine-diversity

Following up on TPAC 2020 Web Platform Engine Diversity breakout
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What tweaks does the W3C Process need to better distinguish "specs" from "standards" ? #2

Open michaelchampion opened 3 years ago

michaelchampion commented 3 years ago

Most spec incubation work today happens in Community Groups (CGs), not in Working Groups that must conform to the [W3C Process] (https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/). The Process says little about how CG's operate, but specs under incubation in CGs are often widely interoperable well before they are "mature" according to the Process. This creates confusion and occasional conflict; how might the Process be tweaked to mitigate such problems?

bkardell commented 3 years ago

I decided not to mention on the initial call, because I was worried it had already gone a little far afield from where I thought we were trying to take it, but is seems worth mentioning:

People have been historically confused by things that are "rec track" too, which was part of the reason in separating things out in the first place. While it's true that we have some spec styling issues, I feel like it goes beyond that in the sense that I still don't think that it is still always crystal clear on "rec track" either. While these are important terms in some sense, in my experience, most regular developers don't care about any of these things except insofar as they give 2 signals indicating to them that "a bunch of people are actively working on this" and "this is widely implemented". However, as I said I don't think this is "fixed" either in the sense that in both those cases too, this can be unfortunately fuzzy. Really, until a thing ships universally were somehow still in some stage of "some of us are hoping we can sort something out in this space and trying to figure out what that really is" that is really just levels of increasing seriousness/attentions - and lots of things that are totally "rec track" get stuck or take years and years to gain enough attention, while other things just get done regardless.

I think that if we are worried about what is being communicated via style, this is potentially as relevant.

michaelchampion commented 3 years ago

Thanks @bkardell , I think this is an important issue to get broader input on. To restate the problem the way I understand it: When real-world developers encounter some challenge, they want to know "Am I on my own here and I just need to write code", vs "Is this a common problem and others are working on it, so maybe I can find a solution in a framework/polyfill/prototype out there somewhere" vs "Is a solution widely implemented in browsers and I don't know about it"? I'm guessing the the solution to this meta-problem doesn't involve changes to any of the W3C/WHATWG/TC39 processes (which few real developers find useful to understand in detail), but might involve changes to how these orgs, and/or MDN, talk to developers.

[BTW @jeffjaffe and apropos https://github.com/WebStandardsFuture/browser-engine-diversity/issues/3#issue-733198722 , this is another illustration of issues relevant to the breakout session but don't seem appropriate to ask the Process CG for guidance on ... or do I have too narrow an understanding of its scope?]

So how could the standards community better help developers here? Do the developers you're thinking of not find what they're looking for in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ or https://caniuse.com? Are they finding the draft specs in WICG or wherever and confused by their look and feel? I don't expect you to have the answers :-) but maybe you can help get the right people in the conversation!

jeffjaffe commented 3 years ago

[BTW @jeffjaffe and apropos https://github.com/[/issues/3](https://github.com/WebStandardsFuture/browser-engine-diversity/issues/3)#issue-733198722 , this is another illustration of issues relevant to the breakout session but don't seem appropriate to ask the Process CG for guidance on ... or do I have too narrow an understanding of its scope?]

@michaelchampion it seems to me that this issue #2 - "What tweaks does the W3C Process need ..." is very appropriate for the Process CG. That's what they work on.