Re: Thoughts on a new charter for HTML

to follow up on what Dan Connolly said:

> Let's put it this way: extensibility and scalability
> are laudable goals, but they're also hard problems. I
> think a lot of folks would bet against any random group of 20 people
> who claimed to be solving these problems:

[Extensibility, Conformance, ...]

Extensibility, scalability and conformance are performance
dimensions.  To get to requirements, we would need to introduce
appropriate scales and thresholds.  But these performance
dimensions should not be regarded as the riddles of the universe.
A lot is known about them.

The question of the moment should not be "are they requirements?"
but "Are these dimensions of performance important to the Web of
the future?  How can we identify incremental steps that move us
closer to the ideal of a simple and coherent Web with high
performance in all these dimensions?"

This is where Karan Harbison's Scenario-Based Engineering Process
comes in.  If we emulate current best practices in ontology
development, progress in these performance dimensions could be
pursued with high confidence.

And we are not talking about a random sample of people.  Part of
the charter is "participation requirements."  When we set up a
WAI activity we have distribution concepts that say we don't have
a valid panel unless several, identified perspectives are
represented.  I think you may find your assessment of risk goes
down if you are allowed to set similar distribution requirements
for the WG talent pool.

Al

Received on Tuesday, 19 May 1998 15:29:19 UTC