[Engineering] W3C

Fri Nov 16 23:31:51 UTC 2018

On the parsing team we've also interacted w/ the HTML parsing standard,
contributing to web-platform-tests for example.  That effort seems to be
led by the WHATWG more than the W3C I believe, though?  I've also had good
discussions with the JSON-LD folks, although that's more as a potential
user of the standard (T44063, T164655, etc).  I think we might be able to
contribute to i18n efforts as well; I know we recently switched to using
CSS to style citations which required using some of the advanced non-latin
numbering functions in CSS...
  --scott

On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 8:17 PM Jon Robson <jrobson at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> This is pretty awesome.
> As a general note, I've found that in a personal capacity, developers
> working on Chrome and Firefox have been super interested in the Wikimedia
> use case. To give a specific example, although not yet a standard, the
> share API  (
> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/09/navigator-share) was
> interested to hear from me about how this would help Wikimedia from the
> perspective of providing a service-neutral way of passing links between
> apps.
>
> I think that we should definitely have a voice in these meetings (in a
> previous project, a work colleague of mine was involved in the specs for the
> File Api <https://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/> to support a project my team
> was maintaining called TiddlyWiki <https://tiddlywiki.com/>), however
> it's probably not for everyone - it's my understanding that sometimes these
> meetings can get very deep into technical nitty gritties of one particular
> aspect that may not be of interest.
>
> Thanks Ian for setting up the survey! that seems like a great first step
> here!
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 9:26 AM Ian Marlier <imarlier at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> To follow on to this, the big question around joining the W3C is whether
>> we'd get enough value out to make it worth our while.  In talking with
>> current members, they've emphasized that value is really dependent on the
>> amount of time and effort that you're able to put in.
>>
>> Given that, I put together a quick survey
>> <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfC9OT2-Dbg1eDILznodkpFmzHhZCPR0AukzSvP7OjFcSq38Q/viewform?usp=sf_link>
>> to gauge interest across the Foundation.  It should only take a couple of
>> minutes, and it doesn't commit you to anything -- this is just a way for us
>> to figure out whether we should invest in nailing down the details of
>> membership.
>>
>> The survey is here:
>> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfC9OT2-Dbg1eDILznodkpFmzHhZCPR0AukzSvP7OjFcSq38Q/viewform?usp=sf_link
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> - Ian
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2018 at 12:39 AM Gilles Dubuc <gilles at wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> A couple of months ago I became an invited expert
>>> <https://www.w3.org/participate/invited-experts/about> on the W3C Web
>>> Performance working group <https://www.w3.org/webperf/>. This is in a
>>> personal capacity, until the WMF might decide to join the W3C.
>>>
>>> I recently attended TPAC <https://www.w3.org/2018/10/TPAC/>, the W3C
>>> technical plenary/advisory committee in Lyon, where most of the working
>>> groups meet face to face once a year.
>>>
>>> The reason why I joined the working group and attended TPAC, beyond
>>> personal interest, was to figure out if it would be worthwhile for the WMF
>>> to be a W3C member organisation.
>>>
>>> What was the most striking about attending that particular working group
>>> is how little representation actual websites have. Facebook and Akamai had
>>> a couple of people each who participated actively, but then the rest was
>>> mostly the 4 big browser vendors talking between themselves. The existing
>>> members of the group and the co-chairs were very excited that I was
>>> attending, because they crave for feedback about the standards they're
>>> working on from people who will actually end up using them in the wild at
>>> scale. I think that my input influenced some decisions and prioritisation,
>>> as I was able to provide potential use cases and real-life examples of how
>>> we leverage existing standards. Overall it felt like we should have been
>>> part of these discussions a long time ago - and the people making the
>>> standards wish we were - and the reason why some standards sometimes don't
>>> quite fit what we need is probably that our input was missing, or that it
>>> had less visibility as github issues/comments.
>>>
>>> The discussions between the browser vendors were very interesting. The
>>> technical level was very high, which made me realise in some discussions
>>> that I still have a lot to learn about the inner details of browsers and
>>> javascript. I learned a lot. It was also fascinating to discover that some
>>> of the reasons why some browsers don't support standard X or Y are social,
>>> based on some people in the group being more conservative than others. The
>>> Apple folks rejected a lot of proposals initially, stating that they needed
>>> compelling use cases before considering implementation. And sometimes I was
>>> able to provide some, and saw that they were influenced by what I was
>>> saying. I can't say that I convinced them, but I think that without these
>>> exchanges it's guaranteed that Safari wouldn't have supported what we were
>>> discussing.
>>>
>>> In terms of the conference itself, this is one of the conferences with
>>> the most brilliant people per square meter I've had the chance to attend.
>>> Everyone is an expert in their field. If you care about the web, it's a
>>> great experience, you can't attend and not learn a lot.
>>>
>>> Attending TPAC has reinforced my belief that we should be embedded in
>>> the decision-making process that defines the future of web standards. If we
>>> want standards that help our mission, that correspond to our needs, we need
>>> to be there and participate when the decisions are made.
>>>
>>> Now, the next step in the internal discussions about whether or not the
>>> WMF should join the W3C, is to figure out if there are other people other
>>> than myself who would be interested in being active participants in W3C
>>> working groups. The time commitment is a few hours per week to do it right
>>> (most groups have a bi-weekly one hour meeting). Discussions and standards
>>> work usually happen on mailing lists, IRC and github.
>>>
>>> You can check out the list of working groups
>>> <https://www.w3.org/Consortium/activities#Working>and see if there are
>>> some that are relevant to your work (I bet there are...).
>>>
>>> If you think you might be interested in joining a W3C working group or
>>> interest group, let me know and I'll loop you into the "should we join"
>>> internal discussions we've been having.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Engineering mailing list
>>> Engineering at lists.wikimedia.org
>>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/engineering
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
> --
> Jon Robson
> Senior Software Engineer
> twitter: @jdlrobson
> linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorobson/
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>

-- 
(http://cscott.net)
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