Re: Schedule and criteria for FPWD of Contacts API

Hi,

On Nov 30, 2009, at 10:42 , Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote:
> In the tentative roadmap for the DAP specs [1], I put a first public
> working draft of the contacts API [2] for December 2009. Knowing that
> there will be a publication moratorium with the end of the year where
> last publication requests must be made by December 18 [3], I’m wondering
> if that’s a reasonable guess.

Now that Richard has made an updated draft available, I believe that we could stick to the following schedule:

  - People are to review the specification by Wednesday. It's a rather short document.
  - Based on that feedback there's a one-week turn around to make edits (with Richard being helped by other editors, I know I'll be having some time).
  - At the call after next we do a go-no-go on the FPWD.

I'll note that decisions to publish are technical decisions: asking not to publish requires substantiation, not just feeling that it's too early.

> The real question is probably what are our criteria for deciding to
> publish the API as FPWD; my understanding is that we want to be
> reasonably feature-complete so that the Patent Policy call for
> exclusions covers most of what the spec will become.

I think that we should get two things right for FPWD:

  1) It needs to be feature-complete (even if poorly defined) enough to make us safer in the patent exclusion area;
  2) It should have points of integration into browsers well-defined (i.e. the security mechanism and API entry points need to be reasonable enough to start a discussion).

Other aspects such as which fields are present or the exact look of search queries are secondary: they can be handled in other iterations.


> There are three other open action items and two open issues on the
> Geolocation API:
> http://www.w3.org/2009/dap/track/products/5 ; it would be good if their
> owners (Bryan, Robin, Arve) would let us know if they consider them
> critical before FPWD.

Essentially, I think that only ACTION-50 (which seems to have been done, I need to review) is on the critical path.

--
Robin Berjon
  robineko — hired gun, higher standards
  http://robineko.com/

Received on Monday, 30 November 2009 17:13:19 UTC