CSS WG Blog Resolutions 2008-03 San Diego Part I: Work…

Resolutions 2008-03 San Diego Part I: Working Group Operations, Communication, and Charter

Note: The current CSSWG charter expires at the end of June. The new one must be written and submitted to W3C for approval by the end of April.

Note: Daniel Glazman and Peter Linss are co-chairing the CSSWG starting with this face-to-face meeting. Bert Bos remains as the CSS Working Group’s W3C Staff Contact.

Working Group Communications

• Resolved:That the CSSWG’s IRC channel shall be perpetually and publicly logged. That these logs are for us and for the public to see our work in progress, and that they are NOT for the official record. That any important information in the logs MUST be summarized and forwarded to the mailing list (along with, but not substituted by, a pointer to the IRC logs and/or a pasted snippet) by the people involved in that discussion so that no one needs to track the IRC logs to keep up with the group.

• Resolved: That the IRC logs shall have a disclaimer explaining that

  • None of these comments shall be taken as representing WG decisions or as WG communication in any form: they are merely the WG “thinking out loud”.
  • All of these comments shall be taken as “discussion in progress” and should not be taken as official statements even by the people who made the statements. The exact wording of this disclaimer will be decided later.

• Noted: The CSSWG discussed opening up process-related discussions into a new public mailing list, but there was no consensus on that. The current private process / public technical split will be kept until further notice.

• Resolved: Given that the IRC logs will be public, the CSSWG minutes shall also be public. (The CSSWG minutes are usually typed into IRC rather than into a text file.)

• It may take awhile to set up perpetual logging. Public minutes will take effect starting on 2007-03-27.

• Resolved: CSSWG Telecons have moved from noon in Boston on Tuesdays to noon in Boston on Wednesdays. They still last one hour.

• Resolved: Members are expected to call in five minutes before the scheduled time. The telecon will start promptly on the hour.

• Resolved: The agenda for the telecon is due the Monday before the telecon, specifically, before the agenda-writer goes to sleep that night or the sun comes up at his location the next day, whichever comes first.

• Resolved: If a member cannot make the meeting, then s/he must send regrets by the day before the meeting (which should be after the agenda is sent) or risk bad standing.

• Resolved: Participation over IRC is acceptable for telecons in exceptional circumstances. Participation over IRC means reading the minutes in IRC and participating back, not merely being online at the right time.

• Resolved: First topics on agenda must be about resolving issues that require consensus: later topics can be more exploratory discussions.

• Resolved: Attendance at first part of telecon is mandatory, where the first part is defined by the agenda and expected to take 20 minutes.

• Noted: When a decision is made, we need to make sure it is recorded.

• Noted: Issues should come to the telecon with a proposal and a testcase (if appropriate). Issues that need some exploratory discussion before a proposal can be written should be limited to 5-10 minutes discussion.

• Noted: WG discussion should be kept at the technical level. We are not marketers, lawyers, etc. Our job is to push CSS forward.

Module Prioritization

• Resolved: To stay in the charter, a module must have both

  • an advocate who is willing to drive the module’s progress
  • two implementors who report “strong interest” on the scale of “no interest”, “some interest”, “strong interest” in implementing the module

• Resolved: The chairs shall prepare a prioritization report that explains our priorities for each module, indicates which modules have been cut from the charter, and explains the rationale for these decisions. The report shall include for each module whether it has an advocate and how many implementors have no/some/strong interest in implementing the module. This report will be posted to www-style for feedback.

• Noted: Items may be added to our work list only if

  • The CSSWG members unanimously agree that they are in scope for the current charter or
  • The CSSWG agrees that they should be added and the charter is amended to include them.

• Resolved: That Apple’s proposals for animations, transitions, and filters are in scope for CSS and may be added to the next charter if they pass the same criteria all modules must pass to stay in the charter.

• Resolved: Add Web fonts to charter as coordinated effort with SVG group

Candidate Recommendation

• Noted: The “at-risk” feature of CR status should be used more often.

• Resolved: Publicly-available releases, whether of shipped, beta, or nightly status, may be used — at the CSSWG’s discretion — to qualify a spec for PR. Unofficial releases (betas, nightlies, etc) may only be used a minimum of one month after the build has shipped to give testers time to find any major compatibility problems due to the features implemented.

Primers

• Noted: The CSSWG discussed and rejected the idea of creating a separate “primer” document parallel to the spec to explain rationale and give examples. Instead the CSSWG feels that the current practice of combining explanations, rationale, and examples into the spec itself benefits implementors, authors, and spec writers alike.

  Rationale: Splitting this information into two documents

  • makes both documents less clear
  • is a lot of extra work that the CSSWG doesn’t need to take on
  • forces the reader to cross-reference
  • and risks the information getting out-of-sync.

  Keeping the informative rationale and explanations in the spec

  • makes the spec clearer to authors, educators, and implementors
  • helps catch mismatches between the normative text and the spec-writer’s intention
  • and by showing how a feature can be useful gives implementors a greater incentive to implement.

• Noted: The above should not be taken to mean that the CSSWG wants less distinction between normative and informative content: the CSSWG encourages sharp distinctions between these two types of spec content.

Web Conferences

• Noted: The CSSWG discussed the idea of scheduling a 2009 F2F in conjunction with a web conference. Several members expressed opposition to the idea on the grounds that aligning a CSSWG F2F with a web conference lends that conference an implicit association with the W3C and the W3C should be a neutral party. It was suggested that conferences could instead invite some individual members of the CSSWG, such as the chairs or the staff contact, to represent the group instead.

CSSWG Website Update

Jason Cranford Teague is working on a redesign of the CSS homepage. He presented a work-in-progress at the F2F.

Resolved: Jason will run a contest for a new CSS logo. Jason’s “no missing squares” CSS logo will be used until a new one is chosen.

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