Some features are super low risk -- e.g., places where we're playing catch-up with other engines. For those features, there's a form of our process called "Intent to Implement and Ship". If your situation is simple, it's easy-ish.
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
If, on the other hand, you're leading on a new feature for the web...hoooooby, does the bar get high. There are separate phases for implementation, experimentation, and shipping, and the OWNERS (myself included) interrogate the teams, looking to make sure they've got a good case
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
...after all, anything we ship to Stable out from behind a flag is something we're stuck with ~forever. So our process focuses heavily on gathering evidence that lets us judge 2 things: * does this feature solve an important problem? * does it solve it well?
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
Turns out, Browser engineers usually aren't competent to answer either of those questions! So we require teams to seek external feedback and review, both from the
@w3ctag and from developers.1 reply 1 retweet 1 like -
Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
For the CSS/JSON/HTML Modules stuff, you can see the MSFT and Igalia engineers involved running the very first step of this process here: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/ojwkySW-bpQ … Even an "FYI only" thread highlights lots of points the teams have to make sure they've clearly answered.
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
...which is why we encourage teams to spend lots of time on their Explainers. These are high-level feature description documents -- sort of like Design Docs without the detailed implementation details sections. Here's the template:https://github.com/w3ctag/w3ctag.github.io/blob/master/explainers.md …
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
The 3 features mentioned show our process working correctly at 3 different phases of maturity of a proposal. If "Layers" == "portals", those are still behind a flag on canary (not even to Origin Trials yet):https://web.dev/hands-on-portals …
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
We make noise about upcoming features in order to get developer feedback about how to improve the designs. Nothing here is a "done deal", and the API OWNERS can easily refuse to ship them in their current form.
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
For CSS Modules, again, those show the process working well. Per an agreement at a public standards meeting a few months back, our friends at MSFT and Igalia who are implementing it are going with the low-risk feature first; JSON modules. That's still behind a flag too.
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Replying to @slightlylate @bgalbs and
And KV Storage is *also* not "just shipped to stable": https://developers.chrome.com/origintrials/#/view_trial/3175037737296199681 … You can, however, try them out during OT and provide feedback. What the team learns during OT will help (or hurt!) their case if they eventually decide to try to go to stable.
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So, what we're seeing with these three examples, is the process is working in terms of doing what we care about: gathering evidence that we're solving important problems and doing it well...and take the word of developers over our own intuitions in the process.
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& Web Standards TL; Blink API OWNER
Named PWAs w/
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