[whatwg] Technical Parity with W3C HTML Spec

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Mike Shaver <mike.shaver at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> I value technical merit even higher than convergence.
>
> How is technical merit assessed?  Removing Theora from the
> specification, for example, seems like it was for political rather
> than technical reasons, if I understand how you use the terms.

Not quite.  The technical motivation was that there was no clear path
to that requirement getting interop.  The reasons for that were
political/legal, but their effect was technical.


> How
> can one learn of the technical motivations of decisions such as the
> change to require ImageData for Canvas,

On the WHATWG wiki a Rationale page is being assembled by a volunteer
(don't know their name, but they go by 'variable' in #whatwg) to
document the reasoning behind various decisions that come up in
questions.  Beyond that, mailing-list diving.


> or participate in their
> evaluation prior to them gaining the incumbent's advantage of being
> present in the specification text?

Depends on the feature and where it originated.  WHATWG operates on
commit-then-review, so as soon as Hixie hits something in his email
dive and thinks it's sufficiently good, he writes it up.  There can
sometimes be a significant delay between something being proposed and
this happening, though, so within that timespan things can be
discussed without the "incumbent advantage" you talk about.  That
advantage isn't worth much, though, at least not until somebody starts
shipping something.

~TJ