Re: RfC: LCWD of Web Notifications; deadline October 24

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 2:59 PM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Friday, 29 November 2013 at 08:51, Andrew Wilson wrote:
>
> > I don't think the W3C spec can or should claim primacy over the WHATWG
> specification - they are just different (albeit related) entities. In fact,
> I'd argue that it's not the role of the W3C spec to highlight differences
> between itself and any other specs out there, nor should it be instructing
> implementors to ignore other specifications.
>
> But this one just copy/pastes from the other one, no? That's completely
> different than saying "this spec is different from some other spec".
>

The long and convoluted history of the Web Notifications spec is too long
to go into here. Suffice it to say that "one copy/pastes from the other" is
probably an oversimplification. As is saying that one spec is somehow
canonical while the other is a fork. If you're looking for guidance, I will
note that Chrome has implemented the W3C specification, but has not
implemented any of the additional APIs (like Notification.get()) in the
WHATWG spec.


>
> If one spec is going to copy/paste from another one, then it should be
> clear that they are exactly the same bar the boilerplate (and are being
> synchronised and how often). If the spec has modified the source spec (the
> WHATWG one), then it should be clear in what way they differ.
>

I do not believe that there is any intent on keeping this spec synchronized
with the WHATWG document. Jon can correct me if I'm wrong here.


>
> I don't know which spec to review otherwise. Or why I should bother paying
> attention to this one (not as a judgement, but from an implementation
> perspective). Also, what happens if the WHATWG changes once you enter LC or
> CR in a substantive way?
>

You'd have to talk to Anne (the former W3C spec editor and current WHATWG
spec editor) about his goals for that spec. Given that there are already
multiple implementations of the W3C LCWD, I'd say it's unlikely that he
would specify anything that is not backwards compatible with this document.


>
> > In this specific case, the WHATWG spec is a living document, so any
> attempt to enumerate differences would quickly become stale.
> Does that mean that you are planning to freeze this spec? Did you copy and
> paste from a particular date in time and fork from there? Is this a fork?
>

Not sure what "freeze this spec" means, but I think that the point of
having a LCWD is to have a canonical revision that implementors can all
reference. Having that document contain some list of differences relative
to another document that can change at any arbitrary time seems like it's
contrary to the point of having an LCWD.


>
> --
> Marcos Caceres
>
>
>