[Engineering] W3C

[Gilles Dubuc]

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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/engineering/attachments/20181105/fdb3cd88/attachment.html>