Hi Mark, On Sep 25, 2009, at 16:26 , Mark S. Miller wrote:
To clarify, AFAIK, no one on the EcmaScript committee is proposing that WebIDL itself be moved to ECMA, but rather the WebIDL->EcmaScript language binding.
I understand the rationale you have to motivate this proposal, I do have a level of sympathy for it, and I certainly believe that we should do as much as possible to pool our expertise across what I agree is an artificial divide. Yet such a move would seem to me to have more drawbacks than advantages.
One is that defining WebIDL at the same time as the ES binding has the huge advantage of keeping it on mission. I would be concerned that removing the ES bindings would potentially open the door to some level of feature creep, or would risk opening cracks in WebIDL's intended adherence to reality.
Another one is the virtuous feedback loop that I believe would work better if the two are kept close-by. New features in ES5 should be reflected perhaps not only in the binding, but in the core of what WebIDL can do.
Additionally there is co-ordination with all the other WGs that have a stake in this. HTML, WebApps, SVG, DAP, and many others need not only to track WebIDL because it is the formalism but also the ES binding because we all need a concrete binding, because ES is usually the only one that really matters (it certainly is core to our shared vision of the Web) and the one that we use in building test suites. That would be quite a hassle for a fair number of people.
That being said I fully understand that it is conversely true for TC39 participants, and therefore I'd like to find a solution that keeps the work in one place while making everyone happy (or at least, not overly disgruntled).
WebIDL is defined almost entirely in email discussion, there haven't been calls or meetings about it in a long while, and I don't see any in the close future. WebApps will likely touch on it during the F2F but that would be short (it might in fact be non-existent given that it will be discussed jointly with TC39 anyway). So unless there is consensus in TC39 that email discussion is not good enough to move this forward, I believe that all we need is a list. That's why I liked Doug's idea of a public-...@w3.org mailing list for this very purpose. It would be low traffic, people who only care about WebIDL would only get that, discussion would be publicly archived, and everyone would be welcome. We can easily complement that with an IRC channel, and perhaps other supporting services.
I don't care a rat's arse where that list is hosted, and I suspect others here feel the same — so long as we don't split the work, and that all interested parties can help. I like W3C mailing list and their archiving system because they are more sanely configured than most, but I can live with anything else. If ECMA wishes to create the same list I'll happily join, or we can host it elsewhere still.
Would that not work for TC39? If not, can you detail the reasons why so that we can try to figure out a solution?
I guess that we could go the legalese way and start investigating the idea of a MoU between W3C and ECMA on this, but that would take time and probably be rather heavy — with little obvious technological advantage. I'd rather not go there.
-- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/
