On Dec 23, 2010, at 5:20 PM, Mark S. Miller wrote: > On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 1:06 PM, David Herman <dher...@mozilla.com> wrote: > > All we've asked is that we not assume prima facie that we must pick a winner > and stop all work on the other. That said, I don't think we should do much > design work on the list or in committee meetings. The "champions" model has > worked well (for example, for the proxies spec). I think Allen and others > should continue working on private names, and Mark and others should continue > working on soft fields. This conversation has raised helpful feedback and > ideas, so now it's time for people to go back to the drawing board and do > some more independent design work. > > > > +1. > > I feel like we've made important progress on this thread: We broke through an > impasse of mutual inability to understand each other, are now in a position > of a fair degree of mutual understanding, and at a remaining impasse only at > making progress from understanding towards towards agreement. I have had some > good aha's in getting here, and I hope others have too,
Agreed. It felt painful because it *was* painful. Mistakes were made but to err is human. The only way forward is "up". > but now I feel like we're arguing about the nature of our argument rather > than the subject matter. I do not feel I am learning anything new. I think > reverting to off-list design work before another round of on-list discussion > is a fine thing, and I do like the champion model. So I fully endorse your > paragraph above. +∞ > That said, once we do resume these on-list or in meeting discussions, I see > much right and nothing wrong with comparing the proposals and seeing how much > use-case ground that we actually care about we can cover with how little > mechanism. Questions of the form "If A can cover this subset of the use cases > motivating B, do we need B?" are perfectly legitimate. Indeed, asking such > questions vigorously is our only hope at avoiding a kitchen sink language. We > have seen the usability of other languages be ruined by undisciplined growth. Agreed, post-hoc or as I put it a while ago, _a posteriori_. > That does not mean that we need to ask these questions so early as to > suppress exploration and brainstorming. But we are the gatekeepers between > "strawman" and "proposal". We need to ask these questions before admitting > designs across this threshold. Fully agree. /be
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