The Web Platform is built through open and distributed processes, deployed through independent and competing implementations, and tooled through a vast array of frameworks, libraries, documentation, debugging tools that evolve with little or no coordination. While this provides a very dynamic space for new ideas and approaches to emerge, it also means developers need to make sense of a rapidly evolving, very fragmented, and often confusing ecosystem to make the best use of the Web Platform. This can create a severe disincentive to invest in the platform when it is compared to other more cohesive or more centrally managed alternatives.
The mission of the WebDX Community Group is to facilitate coordinated approaches to improve the overall experience of developing for the Web platform when such coordination provides unique opportunities for these improvements.
As part of this charter, the WebDX Community Group is focusing its activities on two main pillars:
- Coordinating research efforts to better understand the major obstacles and gaps that developers face when using the Web,
- Building a shared understanding and description of the existing interoperable surface of the Web Platform and its supporting infrastructure to help drive consistent communication on the features developers can build with confidence on, e.g., in projects that reference features of the Web Platform to converge on a common set of features.
- Anything to do with testing or creating tests (e.g. tests, test suites, test harnesses, test results) - these should happen as part of the Web Platform Tests project
- Developer documentation, e.g. MDN - related discussions should be brought to the relevant fora, e.g. the MDN Product Advisory Board and the Open Web Docs Steering Committee
- Any browser specification work - this should be conducted in the relevant standardization or pre-standardization forum
The group will conduct all of its technical work in public, on GitHub repositories, with a supporting mailing list for logistical and administrative purposes.
Meetings may be restricted to Community Group participants and guests invited by the group chairs, but a public summary or minutes will be made available publicly.
To be effective, the Community Group expects to coordinate with the following other groups and projects that have direct intersection with its scope:
- Web-platform-tests and in particular its Interop project
- MDN
- Open Web Docs
- Caniuse
- The Web We Want
- Standardization and pre-standardization groups that developers broadly consider essential to the Web platform (including W3C groups, WHATWG workstreams, TC39, …)
The group chairs can propose the group adopt an amended charter, editing the text using the Decision Process described below.
The decision on whether to adopt the amended charter is made by conducting a 30-days vote on the proposed new charter. The new charter, if approved, takes effect on either the proposed date in the charter itself, or 7 days after the result of the election is announced, whichever is later. A new charter must receive 2/3 of the votes cast in the approval vote to pass. The group may make simple corrections to the charter such as deliverable dates by the regular group decision process rather than this charter amendment process. The group will use the amendment process for any substantive changes to the goals, scope, deliverables, decision process or rules for amending the charter.