[whatwg] RWD Heaven: if browsers reported device capabilities in a request header

[Jason Grigsby]

On Feb 8, 2012, at 8:04 AM, Ronjec Viktor wrote:

> People, this is really getting out of hand...
> 
> 1. WHATWG is a standards body, meaning it _standardizes_ solutions.
> Everyone who followed the discussion up until now can easily tell that
> currently there is no unified, or even close to common approach to this
> topic yet. Someone says the solution is on server-side, the other one says
> it's on the client-side, the third one says network protocol, the forth
> says headers... This is not the place for such a discussion IMHO.

As a newcomer to the list, I’ve tried to wade in lightly because I’m not certain how these things work. So I’m pleased you wrote that.

My question would be where should the conversation happen then? It seems that within the authoring community finding a solution to handling images has been a hot topic for months. But my experience has been that whenever I see attempts to bring the conversation to people deeply involved in the standards process, the problems are often dismissed or many objections are raised the proposed solution.

Two weeks ago I was talking with Ernesto Jiménez about how the W3C and WhatWG efforts needed feedback and participation from authors. But it is unclear to me how that should happen.

To wit, we have a problem that many of us have being trying to solve. I for one don’t have confidence that those of us who are commonly outside the standards-setting process have the correct answer. I’d be happy for someone smarter than me to propose solutions that move things forward.

To make that happen, it seems necessary to convince people that an actual issue exists and to discuss potential solutions somewhere. So an honest and humble question, if that doesn’t happen here, where does it happen?

-Jason