Hi, Ian-
Ian Hickson wrote (on 4/23/09 4:18 PM):
On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, Doug Schepers wrote:
Jonas and others seem to support broadening the scope, and I've also
been reading various posts in the blogosphere that also question whether
SQL is the right choice (I see a lot of support for JSON-based
approaches). At the very least, I think this group should discuss this
more before committing to any one solution. I note that Ian was already
open to an early spec revision on the same lines, so I hope this isn't
controversial.
If there is something that is more useful for Web authors as a whole than
SQL, and if the browser vendors are willing to implement it, then the spec
should use that, yes.
(I don't know of anything that fits that criteria though. Most of the
proposals so far have been things that are useful in specific scenarios,
but aren't really generic solutions.)
This seems to lead into a discussion of use cases and requirements. You
don't include those in your draft... Do you have a UCR document that we
could put on the wiki, like the one for Web Workers [1] (note that
although I put that into the wiki, I pulled them from somewhere else,
maybe the HTML wiki)?
So, some of the requirements you're listing here are:
* more useful for Web authors as a whole than SQL
* browser vendors are willing to implement it
* should have broad and scalable applicability
The first two are rather hard to quantify, and part of the process of
writing a spec is to discover what these are. The best solution is not
necessarily the most obvious one from the start, and after deeper
examination, browsers implementers may be willing to implement something
that didn't appeal to them at the beginning. (Any spec is better than no
spec, so the fact that they may be willing to implement whatever the
current spec says doesn't mean it's the best solution.)
What are the other criteria you have in mind?
Which other solutions have you looked at that don't meet these criteria?
If this is acceptable to the WG as a whole, I would ask that a message
similar to the above be put in a prominent place in the spec. This
seems like the soundest way forward.
The draft got published today, so it's too late to change the high-profile
version of the spec.
It's not too late at all. This group can publish as frequently as it
wants, and we could have another WD up next week, with such a message in
it. That would have an equally high profile.
The overhead of this seems much less than that of changing the charter.
Rather than add this message, I'd like to just come
to some sort of conclusion on the issue. What are the various proposals
that exist to solve this problem other than SQL, and how willing are the
browser vendors to implement those solutions?
We can do both: publish an updated version of the spec that says we're
looking at various solutions, and examine the solutions that come in (as
a result of broad review that opens that door).
If we are able to come to an immediate conclusion, I'm all in favor of
that. But Nikunj, at least, doesn't seem to think we are there yet, so
I think it's worth reopening the larger issue.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/wiki/Web_Workers
Regards-
-Doug Schepers
W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs
