We'd love to help with your Web-related specification. Here’s how.
The TAG is a service organization. It exists to help ensure that the web makes sense as a platform, that the bits fit together in natural ways, and that the design is coherent. The TAG serves as an advocate for developer interests and consistent design principles.
The TAG focuses primarily on providing technical feedback to folks designing APIs and looking to evolve existing designs. That tends to take the form of collaborative specification review. These reviews tend to start with a discussion between TAG members and spec authors, sometimes on a call or face-to-face meeting, and result in feedback to the design in whatever forum works best for the API designer.
The TAG is happy to provide feedback on nearly any Web-related specification, including work happening outside the W3C. To get TAG feedback, open a review issue in our design-reviews repository.
It may also be helpful to have a look at:
We also suggest you read the Ethical Web Principles which forms the basis for some of the actionable advice we provide in the Web Platform Design Principles and the Security & Privacy Questionnaire.
A positive review doesn’t mean that a spec is “supported” by the TAG or that the design is free of issues, but hopefully it’ll help improve the designs of APIs that request feedback.
The TAG will periodically triage new issues and make assignments. Typically two or more TAG members will be assigned to each issue. Issue assignment means these are the TAG members reponsible for marshalling the activity on this issue. We will also assign labels according to the category of review, its provenance, etc…
Milestones are used to denote what week we will next discuss the issue. We will close the issue when a review is complete. We will also typically mark the review as satisfied, satisified with concerns, unsatisified. We may also used resolution codes timed out (if we did not hear back from the requestor in a timely fashion or if we did not reply in a timely enough fashion), too early if we judged it was too early to start a review, validated (meaning we didn’t have any response), or withdrawn (denoting that the review was withdrawn by the requestor).
When opening a new review, please use one of our issue templates according to the type of request - a specification review, an early review or a dispute resolution. If you are opening up an issue to give the TAG visibility of some activity (an “FYI”) then please indicate that in your issue description. For minor changes to existing specifications, where the requestors feel that the change none-the-less can benefit from TAG review, please inidicate that it’s a minor change in the descirption.
When a specification is being worked on actively in a W3C working group, please ensure that the group chair has agreed to request a TAG review before requesting it.
Periodically, the TAG has held events to gather different parts of the community to discuss experiences with the Web Platform, current work, and future developments. The COVID-19 situation has curtailed this activty.
These have been great opportunities to not only engage with the TAG, but also a wider set of developers. The TAG wants to understand what problems are most important to developers in order to ensure that new designs solve important issues and that feature designers are paying attention to community needs.
See the Extensible Web Summit site for more information on some of these events. We look forward to restarting direct engagement with the developer community via events when possible.
During TPAC (the W3C’s major annual conference), TAG members attend Working Group sessions to understand what’s going on in different parts of the W3C, and to offer feedback and guidance.
You can request that TAG members be present if you think it will help move your discussions forward; depending on the nature of the issue, this might include some or all of the TAG.
Keep in mind that (like many other people), we’re pretty busy during TPAC, so please request such a meeting as early as you can by contacting the TAG chairs.
Issues that aren’t related to a specification can be discussed on the www-tag mailing list. Although the TAG is not actively using this mailing list, we do comntinue to monitor it. If you need a response from the TAG, it’s best to get something into the design-reviews issue tracker or raise an issue via github on one of our other documents.