On Wed, 16 May 2012, Glenn Maynard wrote:
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 8:35 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com> wrote:
The downside of the CG as executed is that it was much less successful
in attracting browser implementor feedback (in part because it was
apparently not advertised in places frequented by browser standards
people). So the implementor feedback only got applied later, and without
full knowledge and understanding of the CGs efforts. It's not useful to
have a standards process that doesn't include all the essential
stakeholders.
This isn't a new suggestion, but worth repeating: starting a CG is fine,
but *do not make a new mailing list*. Hold discussions on a related
monolithic list (like here or webapps), with a subject line prefix. Making
lots of isolated mailing lists only ensures that the people you'd want
paying attention won't be, because the overhead of subscribing to a list
(for a subject people may only have passive interest in) is much higher
than skimming a thread on whatwg or webapps-public that people are already
on.
FWIW I think that forming community groups that are limited in scope to
gathering and distilling the relevant use cases could be a functional way
of working. For example if, in this case, people had said "we will form a
group that will spend 4 weeks documenting and prioritising all the use
cases that a responsive images feature needs to cover" and then the
results of that work had been taken to a forum where browser implementors
are engaged (e.g. WHATWG), I think we would have had a relatively smooth
ride toward a universially acceptable solution.
Of course there are disadvantages to this fragmentary approach compared to
having one centralised venue, but it has the advantages too; notably
people are more likely to subscribe to a low-traffic mailing list that
just covers one feature they care about then subscribe to the WHATWG
firehose. It also wouldn't require the unscalable solution of having
vendors subscribe to one list per feature (fragmentation in this direction
is already a huge problem at e.g. W3C and means that obvious problems with
specs get missed until late in the game because people with the right
expertise aren't subscribed to the correct lists).
