Status: This is a proposal for discussion; it does not yet represent consensus.
One of the primary goals of the CG revamp project is to clarify communications about the status of Community Group specifications, especially as they relate to Recommendation Track specifications.
One approach we have taken is to try to make information readily available so that different audiences can readily answer questions they might have. Up to now, we have done this through the following mechanisms:
- Program-level: Through the CG Redesign project we seek to make it much clearer whether a specification is part of the "incubation track" or the "standards track" at W3C.
- Maturity level: We have enhanced the CG specification lifecycle to better set expectations about work.
- Usage guidance: We have added metadata to the status section of each specification to expose information about implementation traction, adoption, and any known standardization plans.
While we believe that these mechanisms will help users of CG specifications (which we will validate through the beta), we also believe that there remain opportunities to more directly provide answers to questions from different audiences.
This document serves two purposes (at least initially):
- Capture the questions we believe key target audiences are likely to have when examining a CG specification.
- Record ideas for how we might reliably provide answers (or links to answers) to these questions. In some cases we may also simply note that we do not think we can reliably provide answers to these questions (in simple fashion) in which case we can identify mitigation strategies.
Note: After we gain more experience with metadata in CG specifications we may explore reusing that approach in Working Group specifications. Similarly, experience we gain by endeavoring to provide reliable answers to the questions below may encourage us to propose changes to Working Group specifications. However, for now we are considering this as experimentation and have chosen the Community Group Program CG for discussion and to record our findings.
- About interoperability
- How mature / stable is the specification? How likely will changes be in the short term?
- How many implementations are there, and how interoperable are they?
- Are there test suites for compliance?
- About using the technology
- How widely adopted is the technology?
- What tools are available to help me adopt the technology?
- Is documentation available (e.g., on MDN)?
- About interoperability
- How mature / stable is the specification?
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- Is this technology a W3C standard? If not, is it at least on W3C’s roadmap for the Web?
- How many implementations are there, and how interoperable are they?
- What intellectual property rights and licensing are attached to the technology?
- What are the risks of referring to this technology from regulation?
- About using the technology
- How widely adopted is the technology?
- About consumer protections
- Does the specification support accessibility?
- Does the specification support internationalization and localization?
- Does the specification offer benefits to user privacy protection or create new concerns (e.g., related to tracking, browser fingerprinting)?
- Has the technology received security reviews? Is the threat model well-understood?
- Does the technology support (or limit) data portability?
- About the processes used to develop the technology
- Did all parties have an opportunity to participate?
- Did the process guarantee due consideration of all viewpoints?
- Did the group make decisions by consensus?
- Were decision processes in place to prevent single-vendor dominance?
- Were protections in place to prevent anti-competitive behavior?
- Was essential information regarding proposals and decisions readily available to all participants?
- Were adequate dispute resolution mechanisms (e.g., appeal paths) available to participants?