[whatwg] WHATWG decision process (Was: Technical Parity with W3C HTML Spec)

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2010, Mike Shaver 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?

I read all the e-mails (and other feedback) sent on a topic, and try to 
take everything into account and determine the best course of action.


> 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.

It was removed because some significant implementors (in this case mainly 
Apple) did not want to implement it, the same reason as the SQL Database 
section was removed (in that particular case, mainly Mozilla).


> How can one learn of the technical motivations of decisions such as the 
> change to require ImageData for Canvas, or participate in their 
> evaluation prior to them gaining the incumbent's advantage of being 
> present in the specification text?

Take part in this mailing list. :-)


I should note that for various reasons I haven't been able to respond to 
feedback in the past few months (since about March), so I'm somewhat 
behind in dealing with input from the WHATWG mailing list. I am now 
ramping back up and should resume responding to feedback shortly. (I'm 
working on the timed track stuff for <video> at the moment, a topic on 
which there are many e-mails that I must read and evaluate carefully.)

You can see the current progress on feedback here (give it a few moments 
to load, there's a lot of data):

   http://www.whatwg.org/issues/data.html

The list of current pending e-mails is here:

   http://www.whatwg.org/issues/

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'