On Jan 28, 2009, at 5:05 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:
Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Jan 27, 2009, at 10:19 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
[moved to www-archive]
Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
I personally would prefer the Work Group spends its time
discussing actual tangible proposals. And to provide everybody
equal opportunity to produce such proposals.
I think anyone is free to make a proposal, but that doesn't mean
we should publish every proposal as a Working Draft.
This is an example of the a discussion that doesn't lead to HTML5
becoming a better spec.
My goal in this particular discussion is to prevent it from
becoming a worse spec, as I see it. Furthermore, I believe I have
done more than most people to make HTML5 a better spec, and on the
whole I don't think discouraging me from participating in mailing
list discussions will make HTML5 a better spec. I know you have
done much to make HTML5 a better spec as well, I am not trying to
compare credentials, but I do think it is unfair of you to lecture
me on this point.
Your credentials are unquestioned. It is that one specific
statement that borders on a tautology that I am questioning.
My statement was made in light of your suggestion to publish almost
any reasonable proposal as a Working Draft regardless of objection, as
long as a small number of people agree. My understanding, and correct
me if I am wrong, is that you indeed believe that "we should publish
every proposal as a Working Draft", with only the limitation that it
be a good-faith proposal with at least a handful of supporters. And I
also get the impression that you believe that if a proposal is not
published as Working Draft, then it is by definition not receiving
fair consideration. If I misunderstood your position, then please help
me understand. If I understood correctly, then I disagree, and the
line you quoted states the point of disagreement.
Nor is it particularly good argument, as it is predicated on a
fallacy:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/eitheror.html
I do not see how my statement is an example of a false dilemma.
Indeed, quite the opposite. I am arguing for the middle ground of
giving proposals due consideration, and publishing those that have
undergone sufficient discussion and review, and which seem
promising enough to put on the standards track, as First Public
Working Drafts. Is there anything unreasonable about that?
Has anyone asked Mike to stop editing his document, demanded that
he remove it from W3C space, or refused to engage him on the
technical merits of his approach? To the contrary: many would love
to discuss what he is doing and why it may or may not be the right
thing, but you would like to barrel ahead without having that
discussion.
Can we agree to simply capture the issues and move on? And to block
progress of any and all Working Drafts to the Proposed
Recommendation status until all such issues are disposed of one way
or another?
No, we cannot agree to this. First of all, all serious known issues
should be disposed of by, at the very latest, Last Call. Thus, a
Working Draft should not even be in a position to proceed to PR if
serious disagreements remain unresolved. Further, I think some issues
are of sufficient gravity that they should be raised and discussed
before even the First Public Working Draft, and issues such as
appropriate scope or "should this even exist as a normative
specification" are in this category.
Indeed, you and fellow co-Chair Chris Wilson both availed yourselves
of the opportunity to raise these kinds of issues as part of the
process of taking HTML5 to FPWD, and indeed sought to prevent
publication until some of them were resolved to your satisfaction.
While you both ultimately backed off in your opposition, I believe you
were given more than ample opportunity to be heard.
Are you going to allow others the same opportunity?
If you think I am making weak arguments, then by all means, show me
why. But so far, you haven't directly engaged any of my substantive
points, instead diverting into this meta-meta-meta-discussion of
whether I should be making them.
The current process disenfranchises many. Perhaps not you, but
many.
Have you considered whether you may be disenfranchising those who
disagree with you by forbidding them to even discuss the reasons
for their disagreement, or to propose alternate ways of proceeding
and giving justification for their stance?
I would like to enable more people to pursue alternate ways of
proceeding.
But ultimately, some alternatives are mutually exclusive. Either there
are multiple documents normatively specifying the same thing, or there
are not. Either there are disjoint specs for content producers and
content consumers (or some other non-feature-based line of division)
or not. At some point these decisions have to be made.
I believe that publishing an explicitly non-normative markup-only spec
is something almost everyone in the Working Group could agree on as a
first step, if we agree to later revisit the issue of whether it
should become a normative specification in its own right, once it has
had all the review and input we would like to expose it to. It seems
wiser to me to proceed with this widely agreeable compromise, rather
than to push a more controversial approach. I have not seen any
comments from you on that proposed approach.
Regards,
Maciej
