Reforming the W3C TAG
And so it has come to pass that W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) elections are afoot. Nominations have ended and the candidates have been announced. There are four seats open and nine candidates running, so it's worth understanding why anyone should vote for the reformers (myself, Yehuda Katz, Anne van Kesteren, Peter Linss, and Marcos Caceres). For general background, see my previous post. Here I'll include more specifics, so if that sounds boring, here's a kitten!
After doing much reading of TAG meeting minutes, f2f notes, issues, delivered products, and findings I've come to a sobering conclusion: the TAG isn’t focused on eliminating the biggest sources of developer pain today. Now, you can argue that this might not be their job, but I won't agree. It's the TAGs job to help ensure the health of the platform, both for publishers and search engines, but also for authors. And the web as a platform is in some real trouble today.
There doesn't seem to be a sense of urgency in the TAG about the corrosive effects of poor design and integration on the overall usability and health of the system. The Web to the TAG, as I can understand it through the meeting minutes and notes, is a collection of documents that represent internally-referential collections of data which are are linked to other documents, not a series of applications that are attempting ever more impressive feats of richness on a platform that stymies them every time you hit one of the seams. In reality it is (aspirationally) both things but the very real tensions between them don't appear in the TAG's work, leading me to believe that it doesn't comprehend the latter aspect of web development today and what that means for the future health and viability of the platform.
I drone on and on and on about layering because explaining each bit of the platform in terms of the one below it relieves much of the tension created by disconnected declarative forms and APIs. This matters because in today's web when you go ever so slightly off the path paved by a spec's use-cases, the drop-off is impossibly steep, and the only way to keep from risking life-threatening abstraction level transitions is to flood the entire canyon with JavaScript and hope you can still swim in the resulting inland sea of complexity. This is what our biggest, "best" webapps do today, relying on ENORMOUS piles of JavaScript that largely serve to re-create what browsers already do in the hopes of marginally extending that capability. It's simply nuts, but the TAG doesn't seem to acknowledge the threat this poses to everything it holds dear: linking, declarative forms, data...it's all about to be lost beneath the waves, and because the TAG doesn't understand the growing importance of JS, it seemingly doesn't see the threat. Declarative forms disappear first beneath imperatively-delivered complexity; lingua-franca APIs next. Without ways of getting what your app needs while keeping one foot on the declarative path, app developers do what they must; declarative data and relationships become "nice to haves" not "the way you do it". Layering provides easy steps between the levels of abstraction, avoiding the need to re-create what the platform was already doing for you along with whatever custom thing you need -- and it's not the TAG's current agenda.
If elected, I will work to fix that. The TAG is the right group to formulate and articulate a theory of good layering in the web platform's architecture and it's the only group at the W3C whose mission is to help spec authors wrestle with large-scale design and integration problems like this. My background is in apps, and JS, and browsers, and I work at one of the few places deeply invested in ensuring that we maintain a healthy, declarative web for the future. I care tremendously about the viability of the largely-declarative web. Through my work with Dimitry Glazkov and many others on Web Components I've done as much as anyone in the last decade to help build a bridge between the JS and declarative worlds. Dimitry and I created and led the team here at Google that have put Shadow DOM, CSS Variables, Custom Elements, Mutation Observers (and Object.observe) into specs and on the platform agenda, all with the explicit goal of creating better layering; explaining the magic in today's platform and drawing connections between the bits that had none before. And I think we need to keep building more of those bridges, but it's hard when W3C culture views that agenda with suspicion. Why would any WG concern itself with integration with specs outside its charter? It's the TAGs job to inject that global perspective. I believe the TAG should pursue the following work as a way of filling its charter:
- Getting reconnected to web developers: today's TAG isn't composed of web developers (Sir Tim excepted) and the general level of familiarity on the committee with the pressing issues in web development seems low. As a member I'll press to ensure that at least one of the face-to-face meetings each year overlaps with an industry web development conference (not an academic symposium). Having the TAG simply go and listen, and perhaps answer questions in such a forum, would do much to illuminate the gulf in understanding. I also support Marco's agenda of direct developer outreach (G+, AMA, IRC, etc.)
- Forming and expressing an opinion about idiomatic JS APIs: the W3C is the body that specifies JavaScript's largest, most important standard library yet it doesn't seem to treat that task with any care. Poor integration with JS types, idioms, library conventions, and calling conventions are the calling card of W3C APIs. The detrimental effects are pervasive and corrosive. The TAG should produce a guide on designing idiomatic JS APIs for WGs to use. Additionally, the TAG should use its spec review perch to call out poorly designed JS APIs as such and propose changes that improve full-stack integration. Lastly, the TAG should be open to facilitating (or teaching!) classes on how to design good APIs for the web. It's a skill that can be learned like any other, and the TAG has a unique responsibility towards ensuring that the next generation of APIs is better than the last.
- Bridge building to TC39: I've served on ECMA TC39 -- the standards body for JavaScript -- since 2007 and in that time I've seen how the dysfunctional relationship with the W3C enables terrible API design. Needless to say, the results haven't been great. For a small taste, go look at some IndexedDB samples. There are dozens of terrible DOM APIs (from the perspective of JS) and JS fails to help describe interfaces well enough (from the perspective of DOM). The impasse has even been codified. For the sake of the platform and the developers who must use it, we need to do better. I will push to ensure that at least one of the face-to-face meetings of TC39 each year overlaps with a TAG meeting. I'm hopeful that with my fellow TC39 delegate (Yehuda Katz) and the maintainer of DOM (Anne van Kesteren) also on the TAG, we can make serious progress on this front, actively building a culture of understanding between TC39 and the W3C and furthering the common goal of a web that's competitive and well integrated.
- Advocate for layering: it's the TAGs natural role to advocate for coherence in the platform, not only at the markup level, but also inside the app runtime bits that take up so very much of the time in W3C's most active WGs. If the TAG doesn't do this, asking the important questions at the right time and working to show the benefits of collaboration and cross-API thinking, who will? To combat this, I propose that the TAG take as an open issue the lack of coherence in the client side platform and work to identify the largest developer pain-points in findings that work to set an agenda for WGs in the future. There is no hope for a well-integrated, layered platform without every WG accepting some responsibility for the usability and layering commons, and if elected I will work to ensure the TAG is a tireless advocate for that commons.
If that sounds like meaningful progress to you, I'd appreciate your organization's vote; along with your consideration to vote for my fellow reformers: Yehuda Katz, Anne van Kesteren, Peter Linss, and Marcos Cáceres. AC reps for each organization can vote here and have 4 votes to allocate in this election. Voting closes near the end of the month, and it's also holiday season, so if you work at a member organization and aren't the AC rep, please, find out who that person in your organization is and make sure they vote. The TAG can't fix the web or the W3C, but I believe that with the right people involved it can do a lot more to help the well-intentioned people who are hard at work in the WGs to build in smarter ways that pay all of us back in the long run.