Hi Jeff,
Jeff Jaffe wrote:
I'd like to understand your view of the 80% a bit better. I would like
W3C to address this group, and in my view they are indeed well addressed
by having a more agile process with releases that are far more frequent
than today. But I don't think that the 80% will suffice with something
that is only semi stable - and I don't think that 80% needs something
every 3 months. So I would like to understand your thinking on this
point a bit more.
To hopefully explain, the way I see it is that those who need catered
for, are those who will use the features and read the specs, so given
four release channels for HTML specifications:
living
the always being worked on draft
dev
the heavy lifting and testing has been done, time for early adopters
and implementers to use and mature it (say, it's been implemented in
one or two browsers and tests are written).
beta
adopting, other than bugs, a mature feature which is being adopted
(say, it's in 60% of browsers, tutorials and demos written, general
developers are aware of the feature and want to use)
stable
adopted, widely implemented and supported features (standardized you
could say)
I'd suggest that the majority (perhaps not quite 80%) are html authors,
tooling vendors, general web developers/designers and the like, and that
most of them are interested in, and need to have available, the dev and
beta channels - for most people, the "stable" channel is just a marker
which lets them know they can use something because it's commonly
supported (they already know how to use it, because they already have
via the beta spec).
For example, back when i worked in a web agency making end user
websites, I would hack and do demo's using "dev" channel features, I'd
use beta features on my own sites, and for customers who wanted new
features and didn't particularly care about legacy browsers, and I'd use
stable only for larger corps, NGOs and gov sector clients.
As another example, if I was making an HTML editing tool, then I'd be
implementing the beta features, and thus need that spec.
As for timelines, the "living" is just living, the "dev" is whenever
something is ready to push there, the "beta" is arguably one of the most
important and used, needing at least a 3 month update schedule, because
that's the one most people will actually reference when adopting and
implementing features. As for the stable branch I'm unsure, whenever a
feature can be classed as stable and ready to be pushed there I guess.
Hopefully that clarifies, best,
Nathan
