On Mar 29, 2010, at 5:25 PM, Doug Schepers wrote:
Hi, Maciej-
I'm a little frustrated to be having this conversation now, after I
tried for several weeks to get comments on the charter before
sending it to W3M, and then to the AC. There was substantial
discussion on both the member-only list and on this public list
(which you engaged in), and the appropriate time to raise these
issues was then.
I didn't notice these issues then - I didn't think to carefully
compare the new charter's deliverables with the old. It's not my
intent to cause trouble by reporting these issues late in the game. It
just seemed like this was a bug in the charter worth fixing, even if
it's reported later than we hoped.
I agree with the goal of transparency, but the chief rationale for a
charter is as an overview, not as a detailed history or exhaustive
scope delineation; that is what the links to the documents
themselves are for (where those are available). It is unusual to be
asked to go into this level of detail in the scope of a chartering
review in the AC, and I haven't seen evidence that others share your
concerns. I am extremely reluctant to establish a precedent here,
when rechartering is already a major pain.
Doug, you made the new wiki page and explicitly asked for feedback. If
you want to send it as-is, I am not going to complain (any more than I
already have). I am just trying to review what you sent, as you seemed
to suggest should be done. It was not my intent to mess with you, and
I apologize if it came off that way. I know that I can be more blunt
than I intend at times.
For example, I made a mistake in the previous charter by relying too
heavily on the descriptions of specs from their abstracts, while the
group as a whole did not have consensus on the scope of those
deliverables. In the examples you cite here, I was too precise: the
Web Database one (where we all agreed that we wanted the
functionality, but had disagreement on whether it would be based on
SQL or B-Trees); and the secure cross-domain scripting one (where
there are disagreements about the mechanism). I was glad to be
given the opportunity to correct those mistakes.
I think the UMP and IndexedDB entries are reasonable as given on the
wiki page now.
My only serious concern is the Programmable HTTP Caching and Serving
entry - I think it's just factually incorrect.
Here is the first Editor's Draft of WebSimpleDB: <http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2006/webapi/WebSimpleDatabase/Attic/Overview.html?rev=1.1&content-type=text/html;%20charset=iso-8859-1
>
It does not include Programmable HTTP Caching and Serving. I just
checked every single CVS revision of WebSimpleDatabase and
WebSimpleDB, and none of them include it. (Some early revisions do
*mention* DataCache, but as a separate spec they might interact with,
not as part of WebSimpleDatabase itself).
In fact, the first Editor's Draft of DataCache dates back to July 15,
2009: <http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2006/webapi/DataCache/Overview.html?rev=1.1&content-type=text/html;%20charset=iso-8859-1
>. But WebSimpleDatabase was first committed on September 3. So it
seems physically impossible for DataCache to be a split from
IndexedDB, since it became a work item *before* IndexedDB did. Not
only that, but DataCache is not even close to in scope for the
previous Web Storage work item, while you've made a reasonable case
that IndexedDB is similar in spirit, if not in technical details.
Perhaps at this point, if you have specific changes you would like
made, it would be best to have your AC rep describe them in the
normal course of AC review, or to discuss them in the AC forum?
You're welcome to take my feedback or leave it, but I really feel like
the wiki page is making a factually inaccurate claim. If I am somehow
mistaken in my analysis above, then my apologies, and I would
appreciate if you would tell me where I went wrong. But I'm really
trying to help you make this page accurate, not to jerk you around.
Again, sorry if my feedback came off as overly negative.
Regards,
Maciej
