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As the title says, how can someone suggest a specification to the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c)? Is it even possible? Can someone at least suggest the w3c to have a discussion on the specifications suggested? Or is it done by the voting system, as in Area 51 of StackExchange?

I did some googling but couldn't find anything helpful.

Arjun
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because we are not support for the W3C. This question should be asked directly to the W3C. –  Sep 22 '15 at 23:43
  • @Snowman Okay!!! I respect the community rules. – Arjun Sep 25 '15 at 01:59

2 Answers2

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A very good place to start these days is at https://discourse.wicg.io/. That’s the Web discussion forum for the Web Platform Incubator Community Group (WICG), a W3C Community Group (CG).

The WICG is open to participation from absolutely anyone, and was created through collaboration with all major browser-engine projects (Webkit/Safari, Gecko/Firefox, Edge/MSIE, Blink/Chrome) expressly for the purpose of providing everybody with “a lightweight venue for proposing and discussing new Web-platform features”.

The WICG just started recently but has already published Contributing New Proposals guidelines.

Here from those guidelines are the key steps it outlines for the development of a new feature:

  1. State the problem
  2. Join the group
  3. Evaluation
  4. Use cases
  5. Advocate
  6. Specify it
  7. (Bonus points) Implementation

That outline’s based on looking at previous successes in getting new features into the platform (e.g., the responsive-images <picture> element and srcset attribute) and sort of reverse-engineering the steps that led to those successes, documenting them, and optimizing for them.

As somebody who’s been closely involved in work on the platform for a lot of years now, I cannot overstate the importance of step #1 from that outline, State the problem.

The most progress gets made with the least amount of acrimony when people show up with very clear problem descriptions first, and ask others for ideas about how to solve the problem—as opposed to, say, showing up with a solution already in hand themselves, and being already over-invested in their own idea of what the right solution is.

There’s lots of positive energy behind the WICG and it’d be great to get more people involved in it.

sideshowbarker
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  • I am confused regarding which answer to accept. Both the answers seem to solve my problem very effectively. Can you suggest me some consideration before accepting any answer??? – Arjun Sep 22 '15 at 02:43
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    @World Engineer’s suggestion is a good one in general regardless of what layer the problem you’re looking to solve is in; for example, if it’s something that can be solved with a technology for a new data vocabulary of some kind (just to pick something off the top of my head). But if you more specifically envision the fix being something that’d get implemented down in the UA/browser-engine layer itself—that is, natively, cross-browser, in browser-engine code, then I can tell you that the WICG is definitely the place where the browser vendors and W3C would like for people to bring those ideas. – sideshowbarker Sep 22 '15 at 02:50
  • Thanks for your help!!! I accepted your answer and upvoted as well !!!! Take this gift , it has everything you crave for, you just need to open it. ha ha ha . Thanks again!!!! – Arjun Sep 22 '15 at 02:58
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You'd start a W3C community group.

The path from there is to build support so that it gets adopted by a Working Group. Working Groups are harder to join since they require that you be either an employee of one of the members of the W3C or an invited expert.

Getting something to a standard is a fairly lengthy process.

  • I am bit confused regarding which answer should I accept. Both the answers seem to solve my problem effectively. Any suggestions to consider before accepting??? – Arjun Sep 22 '15 at 02:41
  • As one of the answer was to be accepted, I accepted @slideshowbarker 's answer, but I've upvoted your answer. Thanks!!!! – Arjun Sep 22 '15 at 02:52