Guiding principles

[rkirsling]

It seems it would be helpful to have a document of "guiding principles" for newcomers to keep in mind when making a proposal or prioritizing concerns that arise when evaluating proposals. (Perhaps this would also serve to address some ES Discuss noise, as @waldemarhorwat and @ljharb were relating.)

My understanding is that such principles may not currently exist in an official sense, but even a simple list of the things "in the ether" among the committee would be wonderful to have.

Whether this should exist as its own document or as a preface to, e.g., #1 is an open question.

[ljharb]

See https://github.com/tc39/Reflector/issues/106 as well

[samuelgoto]

I tried to compile some of these "guiding principles" but the feedback that we got was generally that there isn't enough convergence to call these "principles" more so than something along the lines of "considerations". That is, there isn't a fixed set of unbreakable rules/principles but rather a collection of trade-offs that are used in conjunction.

So, currently, we have these "considerations" in the terminology doc in the following sections:

https://github.com/tc39/how-we-work/blob/master/terminology.md#considerations
https://github.com/tc39/how-we-work/blob/master/terminology.md#on-growing-a-language

Does that make sense?

[samuelgoto]

On a related and conflicting note, I was just sent this with a set of guiding principles for HTML/CSS which holds mostly:

https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#support-existing-content

[rkirsling]

... currently, we have these "considerations" in the terminology doc ...

Yeah, I suppose those should cover the ground I'm looking for after all—I'm just hoping for a sort of distilled rationale / list of tenets to weigh into consideration. Certainly not expecting any kind of enforcement per se, just something to support community cohesiveness / signal-to-noise ratio.

That said, I feel like "glossary" and "considerations" are each deserving of their own document. 😄

... a set of guiding principles for HTML/CSS ...

Nice! This is exactly the kind of thing I was visualizing. Perhaps we could have our own, with this as inspiration?

[ctcpip]

it seems like this is covered via:

https://github.com/tc39/faq
#136
https://github.com/tc39/how-we-work/blob/main/terminology.md

if not, please reopen