The WHATWG Blog

W3C restarts HTML effort

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

The W3C today publicly announced that they are restarting an HTML specification effort. This is great news and a clear validation of the WHATWG effort, which has been leading the maintenance and development of HTML since 2004.

Surprisingly, the W3C never actually contacted the WHATWG during the chartering process. However, the WHATWG model has clearly had some influence on the creation of this group, and the charter says that the W3C will try to "actively pursue convergence with WHATWG". Hopefully they will get in contact soon.

In the meantime, apparently anyone can actually join the W3C effort. The instructions to join the group are as follows:

1. 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."
2. Within about five minutes you'll receive a confirmation code by e-mail. Follow the instructions in that e-mail.
3. 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".
4. E-mail Dan Connolly and Karl DubostMike Smith ([email protected], [email protected][email protected]) asking for approval. (Just say "Hi, I'd like to join the HTML working group. Thanks.")
5. You should get a reply back within about ten days, at which point you can fill in the Joining the HTML Working Group form.

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.

Joining the group doesn't commit you to anything (e.g. you won't have to attend meetings or anything if you don't want to). The group's charter clearly says that all decisions will be made in ways that don't require attending meetings.

This post has been updated a few times to take into account new information about how to join the group.

Posted in WHATWG | 21 Comments »

Proposing features

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

I'm happy to see the increased interest in HTML5 recently — especially with the amazing work Lachlan, Henri, and others are doing with this blog, the validator, feedback, and so forth.

Since the volume of feature requests is only going to increase in the near future, I thought I'd list some things that would make evaluating proposals easier. Here are some key things that any proposal should include:

• What is the problem you are trying to solve?
• What is the feature you are suggesting to help solve it?
• What is the processing model for that feature, including error handling? This should be very clear, including things such as event timing if the feature involves events, how to create graphs representing the data in the case of semantic proposals, etc.
• Why do you think browsers would implement this feature?
• Why do you think authors would use this feature?
• What evidence is there that this feature is desparately needed?

Obviously, we want to keep the language as simple as possible. That means not everyone will get what they want. Having clear answers to the questions above will help all of us work out what is most important.

Posted in WHATWG | 5 Comments »