Even if you want to use your prototype implementation to inform your spec's design, I'd highly recommend bringing up your general ideas on some standards list ASAP.  These lists often have a lot of smart people with a lot of varied experience.  Often they'll be able to point out major flaws in your idea or other technologies you might want to look at.  And, at very least, it'll give you an idea of how your final spec will be received.  I'd highly suggest at least floating the general concepts around some standards lists otherwise there's a good chance your proposal will be dead on arrival.

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Eric Seidel <eric@webkit.org> wrote:

Secret ports have an absolutely horrible track record of ever catching
up with public WebKit.

Only one has ever been successful to my knowledge (Chromium) and I'm
not even sure we could call it full success yet.  (They've spent 2
years attempting to fully catch up, and yet you can't build a useable
binary out of webkit.org -- although that's very close!)

Apple's iPhone fork has (or had, maybe this has changed) one full-time
person who's job is constantly merging.  I'm not sure how close to
tip-of-tree they're able to stay.

It's possible that you work with the most fantastic engineers WebKit
will ever see.  But let me caution you: if CableKit forks in secret,
you're very likely to always be months if not years behind and riddled
with security vulnerabilities. :)

Furthermore, specs take a long time and a lot of buy-in.  Spec-work
done in secret is unlikely to end up ever getting the buy-in it needs
to become a spec.

Best of luck.

J