[whatwg] Correcting some misconceptions about Responsive Images

Matthew Wilcox mail at matthewwilcox.com
Thu May 17 11:12:15 PDT 2012


On 17 May 2012 18:49, Rafael Weinstein <rafaelw at chromium.org> wrote:
> It's easy to see how the experience you describe below would be
> frustrating. FWIW, I routinely feel frustration at seemingly wasted
> time.
>
> Unfortunately, it's inescapable that reaching consensus can be
> exhausting, especially via email -- and doing so always requires
> re-explaining the same thing multiple times in multiple ways. This is
> true for everyone.

Agreed, there will always be an element of this - although in the case
of the CG this got to the point that we addressed it with a FAQ page.
That helped us and people visiting. It didn't seem to help the WG, for
whatever reason?

> In fairness to Hixie -- being an editor is fairly thankless and he
> does a remarkable job of keeping up even just with whatwg, webapps and
> a few others (I gave up long ago). If you need someone to understand
> something, it's best to directly bring it to their attention. The
> internet is a big place =-).

I can see both sides of this. When you're busy, you're busy, and Hixie
is busy. On the other hand, this was a long drawn out multi-month
problem that was talked about quite literally everywhere. It's the
fact that the scope of awareness everywhere else was so large that
makes it so surprising it was missed in the one group that it ought to
have been forefront of that subject.

> I agree with both Jonas and Maciej's points above about lessons for the future.
>
> It seems like the basic problem is that a feature which needs lots of
> work collecting use cases and developer feedback requires a setting
> which isn't intimidating for developers -- but ultimately, if it wants
> to land in a spec, it needs the perspective and experience of
> implementors and editors.

I think we all agree on that :)

> A few humble thoughts
>
> -Have the CG recruit an experienced implementor or editor to
> participate more or less from the beginning. This may short-circuit
> time spent on solutions that won't work for esoteric reasons, and
> there will be at least one person with one foot in both worlds.

This would be awesome.

> -Cross-post significant outputs & decisions to whatwg, public-webapps,
> etc... E.g. collected use cases, strawman proposals, recommendations,
> etc... Even with the help of an implementors/editor, the ideas that
> survive are those that withstand the scrutiny of the entire community
> and getting that scrutiny early is nearly always better.

Cross posting is always risky. If the items under discussion are still
maliable then what happens is two discussions break out between two
lots of un-related groups and things get messy.

I'd be up for this route only if it was very clear of the role of each
party, and lines could be drawn that properly segment the discussions.
i.e.,

1) CG: "We have collected enough use cases from a wide spread of
authors; we are now presenting this back to the WHATWG - if you wish
to follow along with possible solutions, please take part there"
2) WG: discusses possible solutions and *whenever* there is doubt
about what an author would prefer to do or what they will understand,
it gets bounced back to the CG
3) CG: present the WG's dilema in a succinct way that presumes no
prior knowledge, and solicit feedback from authors outside of the WG
list, which is then fed back to the WG.
4) WG: makes decisions based on that feedback.

That to me would work best for both communities.



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