I'm pleased to say that the work we're doing in the W3C to agree on a Core Vocabulary has made substantial progress and we're seeing the end of the tunnel for an initial release. The Vocabulary has followed a lightweight process that involved mainly 3 steps, the submission via a web form, the discussion by the group about every submitted property and eventually the inclusion in the vocabulary document.
As a reminder the Core Vocabulary is aimed at basic content adaptation for mobile devices. The properties here defined are not meant to solve every possible adaptation need for the mobile web, but rather serve as a basic set of data to get started and be able to produce the content in a way that should fulfill most cases. We could see it as an 80/20 approach, we tried to solve 80% of the problems with the smallest possible set of properties.
The group received some consistent submissions and the debate on some has been surprisingly easy. It turns out that most of the properties that were submitted have been easily included in the Vocabulary OR easily left out. Just a few have remained in the middle where some members thought they should be part of the Vocabulary and some othes did not. My feeling is that some properties such as "table support" were too general and will need some refinement to find their place in the Core Vocabulary.
There are two good news here, the first is that the process of adding new properties will continue in the future so that some of the properties that have not been included so far will be included in the future; the other good news is that we are temporarily closing the discussion so that we can consolidate the document and focus on the API work that needs to be completed.
Most of the discussion has happened in public and anyone can see the traces on the group's blog and on the mailing list archives.
The W3C Core Vocabulary is obviously going to be part of our device database. Reading the document that we are working on (I'm the editor) should give you the hints about the basic properties that will certainly fit into our device database. This does not mean that the database will be limited to these, but we think that these will be interesting to most developers and designers and we are confident that we will be able to provide a lot of quality data about them.
A few reference links:
- Process to add a property
- Submitted properties
- The Core Vocabulary
- DDWG Blog
- DDWG public list
- DDWG Vocabulary public list
