refactor the proposal stages table for better communication

michaelficarra commented 9 months ago

As we discussed in plenary, this is an incorporation of the presented "purpose", "status", and "external communication" terms into the stage table of the process document. Additionally, the table is simplified by reducing to 4 columns from 7 without losing any information. The "status" column is targeted at the community and other external consumers, and the entrance criteria and purpose columns are targeted at champions and other TC39 representatives. Help text for the "purpose" column clarifies that "These are the actions that will be undertaken by the committee and the proposal authors while the proposal is in this stage".

While it is mostly a rewording, there are some "normative" changes made that I think more accurately capture how we use our process in practice:

Moved "Proposal document describes all high-level APIs and syntax" and "Illustrative examples of usage" from stage 1 entrance criteria to stage 2 entrance criteria.
Replace references to "ECMAScript editors" and "ecma262" with "the relevant editor group" and "ecma262 or ecma402" so that the document applies correctly to Intl proposals
Removed test262 entrance criteria from stage 4 since it's now already required for stage 3.

Since it's been mostly rewritten, I'd recommend reviewing the rendering instead of the diff.

Here's a rendering of the table as of submitting this PR:

Ping @waldemarhorwat since he asked to be notified when I opened this PR.

michaelficarra commented 9 months ago

@ljharb I thought about it, but since I couldn't entirely obviate it (I would love to see that W3C document referenced), I decided not to go that route.

michaelficarra commented 8 months ago

Since the initial wave of feedback seems to have concluded, the PR has stabilised, and we've received some approvals, I've generated an updated rendering to make it easier for any further reviewers to review the current revision:

ljharb commented 8 months ago

All of them have kind of a "headline" under the Purpose column except 3 and 4, should they have them too? Perhaps "Implementing and Shipping" and "Specifying and Merging" or something?

michaelficarra commented 8 months ago

I figured those ones are kind of just the "headline". Stage 0 purpose also has a bit of a longer "headline" FWIW.

michaelficarra commented 7 months ago

This has reached consensus at today's plenary.

tc39 / process-document

refactor the proposal stages table for better communication #38