Welcome!

A decade ago, Web standards used to be created behind closed doors. Then they moved into the open, with public mailing list discussions and bug trackers. Then a growing number of specifications started moving to open source repositories (typically GitHub) where they can be tracked, modified, and in some cases even forked.

Yet contributing to standards remains hard. You have to find the specification (and get the right one amongst many different documents), find the group that is in charge of it, look through mailing list archives to see if your feedback has been sent before, post to a mailing list, etc.

This site aims to make starting and pursuing conversations about Web standards much easier. Signing up should be trivial, searching for a similar topic should just work, and if nothing is there you can just post. If there is no matching category, just post without and we’ll add it.

Basically, if you have anything to say about Web standards, be it a new feature or feedback on an existing one, just say it!

Let’s Spec The Web Forward!

Hello everyone, I may be missing it, but I can not find where on this site it explicitly states what the topics of focus should center around. Is this platform centered around the W3C HTML Working Group activities or is it more loosely based? This type of guidance, perhaps in the FAQ page, would empower newbs(or at least me) to contribute more logically.

Any and all discussions related to Web standards. Don’t worry about working groups or SDOs, just about the tech you need in the browser.

Is the name intentionally spelled incorrectly to be humorous (e.g. “fiction of specs”)? “Specifiction” instead of “Specification”?

Yes, this is a wilfull violation of spelling (born from the non-humorous actual typo found in some W3C specs)

So, I rather like the tool, but one inconvenient I see is that it creates yet another place where you have to track discussions and where discussions threads get forked (on top of mailing lists, github issues, other tracking systems, twitter, etc).

@JamesMGreene Yes, it is intentional. It so happens that “specifiction” is actually a pretty common typo from W3C specification authors, so it has become a running joke over time.

Yeah, but I’m not sure how to help with that. It is hard to improve the stuff that’s already deployed. Suggestions for bindings that make trackability simpler are welcome.

Note that we can use specifiction.org more broadly. There could be a dashboard watching discussions here as well as on specific lists, twitter keywords, etc. Just a thought.

I think “specifiction” makes sense: it’s fictional specifications, to provide inspiration for real, fleshed out specifications.

This should probably get replaced with a fresh “Welcome to the WICG Discourse” thread now that this forum has an actual, concrete way to move forward from it.

The OP for such a thread should probably link to / copy from the announcement at http://www.w3.org/blog/2015/07/wicg/.

In my opinion, Discourse is the best web-based interface for discussion currently. It’s so nice (and it has email support (email to reply to discussions))).

I think Discourse makes it really really easy for anyone to join the discussion, which is important. If you actually try to communicate through the older methods used by the actual working groups, it’s a lot more involved. It’d be awesome if this place became the goto hub for discussion of specifications and the web platform in general.

Okay, so this platform here exists now which is great! But… what I’m missing is a general movement or a suggestion on how to get the working groups being moved over here. For example, I’m fed up with the WebRTC community being split into:

• dozens of IETF mailing lists,
• dozens of GitHub projects,
• discuss-webrtc on groups.google.com,
• the W3C WebRTC mailing list,
• hundreds of Google Docs Documents,
• and probably something else I’ve already forgotten.

I have worked in that area for over a year now and still encounter new forums where vital aspects of WebRTC are being discussed. This is toxic for ongoing discussions, raising your voice and following the specification progress since people need to gather months of experience just to subscribe to all relevant platforms.

Can we establish some form of guidance thread? Or perhaps its possible to get the associated umbrella organisations to kindly suggest working groups to move to this platform?

Can someone explain to me what this website is?

I would really like to know

Very good website. I like it here

In the statistics it seems discourse is not so highly frequented now. But maybe some people from Twitter will join us after the musk merger.