Back in March, Google hosted the CSS working group for a three day
meeting.
At the time, we were just starting with the HTML working group, and
the openness of the WHATWG over the past few years was just starting
to be adopted by the HTML working group, after several months of
pushing for it in the W3C (mostly in secret, though myownpostsonthe
matter were all public, as were a
fewothers).
One of the things I brought up in the CSS face-to-face meeting was
the problem of the CSS working group not being open. Many of the
members of the CSS working group have a mentality that view the Web
community (such as those who e-mail the www-style
mailing list) as a resource, not as potentially equal members
of the community. Of the forty or so members of the working group
(those subscribed to the secret internal mailing list), only a dozen
subscribe to the public list. This actually makes it harder
for members of the group to try to be more open — when someone
posts a proposal to the public list, there's a good chance that the
majority of the members of the working group will miss it. During the
meeting, I opined that if the group continued along in this direction,
the group ran the risk of becoming irrelevant; two of the other
members suggested that the group was already
irrelevant. Sadly we were in the minority.
The CSS working group right now is chronically dysfunctional, as
most close observers have noticed.
A great example of this is the difference in how the WHATWG got a
blog and how the CSS working
group set one up. In the WHATWG, the idea was floated for a while, and
then one day someone volunteered
to run it, and the blog was up and running within hours. Anyone
(literally anyone) can post to the WHATWG blog (there's a moderation
step that we added to deal with the spammers, but all it takes now is
to get onto IRC and ask
for the post you wrote to be published). The CSS working group, on the
other hand, has been discussing how to set up a blog, and what the
first entry should say, and what tool to use, for over two
months! Nearly every phone call (the group has weekly
teleconferences) for the past nine weeks has had the blog discussed at
some point.
The blog was finally made
available last week. To post, you have to be a group member. The first
post can be summarised as follows: the CSS working group members
don't want to bother going out of their way to get feedback on their
specs; instead, people should post their comments on CSS to the public
CSS mailing list (despite the fact that most CSS working group members
aren't subscribed to this list). The blog post then goes on to
apologise for the blog's existence, and claims that the blog's aim is
to reach the people who won't subscribe to the public mailing list
(the working group itself, maybe?). The post doesn't make it clear
how the blog is expected to reach this wider audience, since
the blog has no comment feature.
Another example of the problems of the CSS group is visible on the
W3C's Technical Reports page. The
group's primary deliverables are specifications. The last candidate
recommendation published by the group was published in 2004. That was
the Basic UI module, which
was Tantek's baby (he has since left the group). Meanwhile, drafts
like the Backgrounds
and Borders draft, which has had big parts implemented by Safari
for months, and small parts implemented by Mozilla for years, have
iterated several times but make no public process (the backgrounds and
borders draft was published in 2005, but the internal draft was last
modified in February of this year).
Meanwhile, CSS2.1, the working group's most important deliverable,
keeps getting tied up, with the group discussing irrelevant details
and some members repeatedly reopening old resolved issues. The W3C
process doesn't help much here either; the group actually tried taking
CSS 2.1 to Candidate Recommendation stage recently, but was blocked by
the W3C management over an issue which was already present in
CSS2. (In all fairness to Tim, the issue he
raised is one which was already raised by several other people, but
which the group had dismissed. I actually agree with him that it
should be resolved. The group has since resolved to change the spec in
a way that continues to leave the issue undefined, but at least it no
longer contradicts what Web browsers do.)
The group is also supposed to work on test suites. I had
volunteered to work on the CSS 2.1 test suite, but due to lack of
time, I bailed on that last year (Google mainly employs me to work on
HTML5; any test work that I do is done in my free time, which is
mostly spent near aquariums now). Since
then basically nothing has happened.
Being public would expose a lot of these problems, forcing the
working group to act more responsibly. It would also allow people to
contribute — as specification editors, as test suite editors, as
reviewers, as community leaders, and in other roles.
But to be honest, the problems go even further than what I've
described above.
The CSS specs show their age; they come from a time where
specifications were much vaguer than those of the modern day. Someone
really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML,
defining everything in detail, explicitly, with strict and clear
normative conformance criteria, taking implementations into account,
defining things like quirks mode. (The WHATWG community refers to such
a hypothetical project as "CSS 5", as a reference to the way the
current WHATWG specs define HTML5, XHTML5, and DOM5 HTML.)
The CSS working group also doesn't really have the nimbleness
needed to respond to threats to the Web platform like Silverlight. We
need things like flowing-to-shapes, automatic declarative transition
animations, gradients, filters, styling of form controls, and so
on. (The WHATWG is already handling some related, non-presentational,
things, like client-side
SQL databases, video,
and richcontrols.)
We need these things this year, in enough detail that they
can be implemented. An open group can iterate much faster than a
closed group. With an open group we can get test implementations,
feedback, tests, and discussion straight away, instead of waiting
months and then pulling back the curtain and presenting a fait
accompli, at which points comments are perceived more as a pain
than a help.
One way to address this would be for the WHATWG to start a
"subproject" to address CSS, while we wait for the W3C CSS group to
learn from the W3C HTML group and become open. The biggest problem
would be finding editors who would be willing and capable of
doing the incredible work of rewriting CSS from scratch.
So Apple started selling music without DRM the other day. I immediately bought some music. Carey commented that she had bought a lot of
music on iTunes in the past and never really understood DRM, so wasn't worried about it.
Later that evening, we were at my flat, where there is no Internet. She wanted to play her music on my Mac Mini, which is basically my
entertainment system. She made her MacBook join my wireless network, grabbed the remote and fired up Front Row on the Mini, and (after I fixed
the firewall settings) tried playing a song she wanted to listen to.
A concise lesson in why DRM is not a "consumer enablement" technology ensued.
I really don't understand why DRM is legal, let alone why it's legally enforceable in many countries. Right now I think it's mostly just the
geeks who understand why DRM is fundamentally stupid, but I hope that as more users get exposed to technology and try to do obvious things like
transferring their media from one device to another, they'll come to demand their fair use rights, and the law will swing back from backing the
modern organised crime rings (like the MPAA) to backing the ordinary citizen. Question copyright.
Everyone should make sure to learn about fair(y) use.
For the recent long weekend, Carey and I went to Monterey to see the aquarium. We joined and visited the fishies four times that weekend.
Some of the exhibits were more art-like than I expected:
We also went down Scenic Highway 1, which has some scenic parts, and where petroleum is even more expensive than in less remote areas.
Before we left we stayed at Carey's, where Max decided to bring me a live bird! What a darling cat. He's so cute.
In other news, I met the TAG for lunch today. It was an interesting experience. I still don't really understand what they're doing. At one
point I asked about one of their documents and pointed out that for most specs things have to be defined in terms of document models, not the
actual byte streams coming over the wire. For example, for HTML you have to define what happens when an author creates a table
element using the DOM APIs and then moves a p element into it — what does that represent. There's no source byte stream, it's all scripted. The
members of the TAG seemed to think that was a little more complicated than they wanted to deal with. That was sort of strange to me, since I
somewhat consider that to be the only interesting case (in the HTML5 spec, the byte stream, if any, is converted to a DOM before any of the
things that they were talking about are examined). Oh well.
June is going to be an interesting month. The HTML working group is supposed to publish something (I suggest the spec); Apple is going to announce their latest stuff, which I'll probably
buy; Pixar are releasing Ratatouille (Holy Pixar Day is June 29th); Wilhelm will be in from out of town so we can play World of Warcraft (the
board game).
I'm sitting in the Green Room of the Lucie Stern theatre in Palo Alto, where I'm
volunteering on the stage crew of The Merry Widow. Actually for this
performance I'm volunteering as a stage crew substitute for when other crew members
can't make it. I didn't want to do a third Opera in a row (I was on the crew of Macbeth and The Queen of Spades earlier
this season).
Speaking of Cats, and friends, Brian, Lisa, her parents, Carey, and myself went
to see the Moscow Cats Theatre at
the Palace of Fine Arts in the city. I was wearing my cat socks and my "CAT PERSON"
t-shirt, and Carey and I were sitting front row centre. As you might imagine, I
ended up on stage for one of the tricks; a cat jumped back and forth on my back! It
was awesome.
By the way, the WHATWG site (and this Web log, and lots of other sites I use)
are all now carbon
neutral, hosted by DreamHost. Nice guys. I'd recommend them.
Talking about HTML, Tantek has started pushing for a new acronym for me to add to
my list of acronyms that don't mean anything new: now, in addition to DHTML, REST,
and AJAX, he is adding POSH. Plain
Old Semantic HTML. It's actually a pretty good thing to be pushing for. I encourage
everyone to publish POSH.
I've been playing a lot of Little Green Guys With Guns recently, a highly addictive graphical play-by-e-mail turn based strategy game.
For that last few games, my score has been oscillating:
To make my score go up higher, I need more inexperienced players to beat (because the experienced ones are too freaking good). So. Go join up! Play challenges I put out!
2007-03-08 20:32 UTC
How YOU can join the W3C HTML5 Working Group in six easy steps
So the W3C announced that
they are restarting an HTML specification effort.
Anyone can actually join the W3C HTML Working Group. I encourage
everyone interested in the development of HTML5 to take part. If you
don't take part, and the language develops in a way you don't like,
then you have but yourself to blame.
Taking part in the group is not a big commitment. You can spend as
much or as little time contributing; you don't need to read every
e-mail on subjects you don't care about, you don't need to call in or
attend face-to-face meetings. In fact, the W3C has stated in the
group's charter that no binding decisions will be made at meetings;
you are guaranteed equal say whether you are present or not.
To join, you have to go through the following steps.
Fill in the Public Access Request
Form; in the "Reason" field, put: "To apply for participation in
the HTML Working Group as an Invited Expert."
Within about five minutes you'll receive a confirmation code by
e-mail. Follow the instructions in that e-mail.
You should get a reply back from that within two days, giving you
a username and password. Fill in the W3C Invited Expert
Application form. Under "Financial Support", if you're not going
to attend any meetings or if you're going to attend meetings on your
own dime, just put "Self-supported". Under "Possible W3C Membership",
if you're employed but your employer doesn't know you're doing this,
or doesn't care, just pick "My employer does not intend to join".
E-mail Dan Connolly and Karl Dubost (connolly@w3.org,
karl@w3.org) asking for approval. (Just say "Hi, I'd like to join the
HTML working group. Thanks.")
You should get a reply back within about ten days, at which point
you can fill in the Joining the HTML
Working Group form.
You will get a reply back from that within about five minutes, at
which point you're a bone fide HTML working group member!
Note: if you work for a W3C member company, the steps above don't
apply to you. Instead, you have to follow these
instructions.
I would encourage everyone interested in working with the HTML
working group to go through these steps as soon as possible, so that
you will be a member of the group before the work starts.
