Re: URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

2014-12-02 Thread chaals
TL;DR: Administrative details from the W3C Webapps cochair responsible for URL 
in that group. Relevant in practice is a request to minimise channels of 
communication to simplify spec archaeology, and especially to prefer 
public-webapps over www-archive, but I don't see there is any reason this 
WorkMode cannot be used.

02.12.2014, 04:19, Sam Ruby ru...@intertwingly.net:
 On 11/18/2014 03:18 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
  Meanwhile, I'm working to integrate the following first into the WHATWG
  version of the spec, and then through the WebApps process:

  http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/url.html

 Integration is proceeding, current results can be seen here:

 https://specs.webplatform.org/url/webspecs/develop/

 It is no longer clear to me what through the WebApps process means.
 In an attempt to help define such, I'm making a proposal:

 https://github.com/webspecs/url/blob/develop/docs/workmode.md#preface

 At this point, I'm looking for general feedback.  I'm particularly
 interested in things I may have missed. 

A bunch of comments about how to work with a W3C group:

Participation and Communication…
In W3C there is a general desire to track contributions, and ensure that 
contributors have made patent commitments. When discussion is managed through 
the W3C working group, the chairs and staff contact take responsibility for 
this, in conjunction with editors. If the editor wants to use other sources, 
then we ask the editor to take responsibility for tracking those sources. The 
normal approach is to request that contributors join the Working Group, either 
as invited experts or because they represent a member organisation. In many 
cases, contributors are already represented in webapps - for instance while 
Anne van Kesteren isn't personally a member, his employer is, and there is 
therefore a commitment from them.

While webapps generally prefers conversations to be on the webapps list 
(because it makes it easier to do the archaeology in a decade or so if someone 
needs to), there is no formal ban on using other sources. However, I would ask 
that you request comments on publicly archived lists, and specifically that you 
strongly prefer public-webapps@w3.org (which is a list designated for technical 
discussion whose subscribers include W3C members who expect to discuss work 
items in the scope of the webapps group, such as the URL spec) to www-archive 
(which is just a place to give a public anchor to random email - the 
subscription list is completely random and likely not to include many 
interested W3C members).

The TR Process…
The WHATWG document is not a Public Working Draft in the sense of the W3C 
Process (which has implications for e.g. patent policy). Regularly publishing a 
Public Working Draft to w3.org/TR is part of what makes the patent policy work, 
since commitments are bound to various stages including the latest Public 
Working Draft (i.e. TR version, not editors' draft) before someone left the 
group [wds]. Those snapshots are required to be hosted by W3C and to meet the 
team's requirements, as determined by the Team from time to time. If there is 
an issue there, let's deal with it when we see it.

Webapps still generally works under the 2005 version of the Process - but we 
could change this document to the 2014 process. The only really noticeable 
difference will be that there is formally no Last Call, and the final Patent 
Exclusion opportunity is instead for the draft published as Candidate 
Recommendation. (In other words, you need to be pretty bureaucratically-minded 
to notice a difference).

Documents published by W3C are published under whatever license W3C decides. 
The Webapps charter explicitly calls out the URL spec for publishing under the 
CC-BY license [chart], so that is what I would expect for all snapshots.

For normative references, at least until Last Call or CR (depending on whether 
you use the modern Process) I don't think we need to care a huge amount. When 
we do get there, the policy for publishing at W3C will determine what we can do 
in a W3C publication - although we should note that there is a lot of 
discussion about references that fails to take reality into account,and many 
specs have normative references that are actually unusable normatively. My 
*personal* sense is that a lot more references should be informative, admitting 
the state of the universe as it is rather than as we wish it were. But I'm 
inclined to cross that when we get there.

Editors
Editors of W3C specs are required [eds] to be members of the Working Group 
publishing the spec. Webapps is pretty liberal about appointing editors - the 
principal criteria are you are in the group and volunteer to do work.

Patent Policy
As I read the invited expert agreement [iea] it uses branching (quoted - 
french-style) as an example of creating derivative works that include the 
Invited Expert's contributions when those derivative works are likely to cause 
confusion about the 

URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

2014-12-01 Thread Sam Ruby

On 11/18/2014 03:18 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:


Meanwhile, I'm working to integrate the following first into the WHATWG
version of the spec, and then through the WebApps process:

http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/url.html


Integration is proceeding, current results can be seen here:

https://specs.webplatform.org/url/webspecs/develop/

It is no longer clear to me what through the WebApps process means. 
In an attempt to help define such, I'm making a proposal:


https://github.com/webspecs/url/blob/develop/docs/workmode.md#preface

At this point, I'm looking for general feedback.  I'm particularly 
interested in things I may have missed.  Pull requests welcome!


Once discussion dies down, I'll try go get agreement between the URL 
editors, the WebApps co-chairs and W3C Legal.  If/when that is complete, 
this will go to W3C Management and whatever the WHATWG equivalent would be.


- Sam Ruby



Re: URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

2014-12-01 Thread Jonas Sicking
Just in case I haven't formally said this elsewhere:

My personal feeling is that it's probably better to stay away from
speccing the behavior of file:// URLs.

There's very little incentive for browsers to align on how to handle
file:// handling. The complexities of different file system behaviors
on different platforms and different file system backends makes doing
comprehensive regression testing painful. And the value is pretty low
because there's almost no browser content that uses absolute file://
URLs.

I'm not sure if non-browser URL consuming software has different
incentives. Most software that loads resources from the local file
system use file paths, rather than file:// URLs. Though I'm sure there
are exceptions.

And it seems like file:// URLs add a significant chunk of complexity
to the spec. Complexity which might be for naught if implementations
don't implement them.

/ Jonas



On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sam Ruby ru...@intertwingly.net wrote:
 On 11/18/2014 03:18 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:


 Meanwhile, I'm working to integrate the following first into the WHATWG
 version of the spec, and then through the WebApps process:

 http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/url.html


 Integration is proceeding, current results can be seen here:

 https://specs.webplatform.org/url/webspecs/develop/

 It is no longer clear to me what through the WebApps process means. In an
 attempt to help define such, I'm making a proposal:

 https://github.com/webspecs/url/blob/develop/docs/workmode.md#preface

 At this point, I'm looking for general feedback.  I'm particularly
 interested in things I may have missed.  Pull requests welcome!

 Once discussion dies down, I'll try go get agreement between the URL
 editors, the WebApps co-chairs and W3C Legal.  If/when that is complete,
 this will go to W3C Management and whatever the WHATWG equivalent would be.

 - Sam Ruby




RE: URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

2014-12-01 Thread Domenic Denicola
What we really need to do is get some popular library or website to take a 
dependency on mobile Chrome or mobile Safari's file URL parsing. *Then* we'd 
get interoperability, and quite quickly I'd imagine.

From: Jonas Sickingmailto:jo...@sicking.cc
Sent: ‎2014-‎12-‎01 22:07
To: Sam Rubymailto:ru...@intertwingly.net
Cc: Webapps WGmailto:public-webapps@w3.org
Subject: Re: URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

Just in case I haven't formally said this elsewhere:

My personal feeling is that it's probably better to stay away from
speccing the behavior of file:// URLs.

There's very little incentive for browsers to align on how to handle
file:// handling. The complexities of different file system behaviors
on different platforms and different file system backends makes doing
comprehensive regression testing painful. And the value is pretty low
because there's almost no browser content that uses absolute file://
URLs.

I'm not sure if non-browser URL consuming software has different
incentives. Most software that loads resources from the local file
system use file paths, rather than file:// URLs. Though I'm sure there
are exceptions.

And it seems like file:// URLs add a significant chunk of complexity
to the spec. Complexity which might be for naught if implementations
don't implement them.

/ Jonas



On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sam Ruby ru...@intertwingly.net wrote:
 On 11/18/2014 03:18 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:


 Meanwhile, I'm working to integrate the following first into the WHATWG
 version of the spec, and then through the WebApps process:

 http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/url.html


 Integration is proceeding, current results can be seen here:

 https://specs.webplatform.org/url/webspecs/develop/

 It is no longer clear to me what through the WebApps process means. In an
 attempt to help define such, I'm making a proposal:

 https://github.com/webspecs/url/blob/develop/docs/workmode.md#preface

 At this point, I'm looking for general feedback.  I'm particularly
 interested in things I may have missed.  Pull requests welcome!

 Once discussion dies down, I'll try go get agreement between the URL
 editors, the WebApps co-chairs and W3C Legal.  If/when that is complete,
 this will go to W3C Management and whatever the WHATWG equivalent would be.

 - Sam Ruby




Re: URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

2014-12-01 Thread Jonas Sicking
On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Domenic Denicola d...@domenic.me wrote:
 What we really need to do is get some popular library or website to take a
 dependency on mobile Chrome or mobile Safari's file URL parsing. *Then* we'd
 get interoperability, and quite quickly I'd imagine.

To my knowledge, all browsers explicitly block websites from having
any interactions with file:// URLs. I.e. they don't allow loading an
img from file:// or even link to a file:// HTML page using a
href=file:// Even though both those are generally allowed cross
origin.

So it's very difficult for webpages to depend on the behavior of
file:// parsing, even if they were to intentionally try.

/ Jonas

 
 From: Jonas Sicking
 Sent: 2014-12-01 22:07
 To: Sam Ruby
 Cc: Webapps WG
 Subject: Re: URL Spec WorkMode (was: PSA: Sam Ruby is co-Editor of URL spec)

 Just in case I haven't formally said this elsewhere:

 My personal feeling is that it's probably better to stay away from
 speccing the behavior of file:// URLs.

 There's very little incentive for browsers to align on how to handle
 file:// handling. The complexities of different file system behaviors
 on different platforms and different file system backends makes doing
 comprehensive regression testing painful. And the value is pretty low
 because there's almost no browser content that uses absolute file://
 URLs.

 I'm not sure if non-browser URL consuming software has different
 incentives. Most software that loads resources from the local file
 system use file paths, rather than file:// URLs. Though I'm sure there
 are exceptions.

 And it seems like file:// URLs add a significant chunk of complexity
 to the spec. Complexity which might be for naught if implementations
 don't implement them.

 / Jonas



 On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 5:17 PM, Sam Ruby ru...@intertwingly.net wrote:
 On 11/18/2014 03:18 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:


 Meanwhile, I'm working to integrate the following first into the WHATWG
 version of the spec, and then through the WebApps process:

 http://intertwingly.net/projects/pegurl/url.html


 Integration is proceeding, current results can be seen here:

 https://specs.webplatform.org/url/webspecs/develop/

 It is no longer clear to me what through the WebApps process means. In
 an
 attempt to help define such, I'm making a proposal:

 https://github.com/webspecs/url/blob/develop/docs/workmode.md#preface

 At this point, I'm looking for general feedback.  I'm particularly
 interested in things I may have missed.  Pull requests welcome!

 Once discussion dies down, I'll try go get agreement between the URL
 editors, the WebApps co-chairs and W3C Legal.  If/when that is complete,
 this will go to W3C Management and whatever the WHATWG equivalent would
 be.

 - Sam Ruby