Re: Proposed requirement: specification should provide enough detail to handle Web content

On Fri, 2007-04-27 at 00:22 -0700, L. David Baron wrote:
[...]
> 2. We should not accept a "leave things undefined" compromise when
>    the missing definition is broad enough that some definitions
>    would handle existing (or future?) Web content as intended and
>    some would break it.  (Of course, there will sometimes be
>    difficult cases where the existing content goes both ways.)  We
>    should instead at the very least narrow the definition to a set
>    of things that do handle existing Web content correctly.

In our current organization, this looks like it will put quite
a burden on the chair, as it is likely to involve quite a few
decisions over the objections of some parties, which is very
expensive in W3C process.

One way to reduce the burden on the chair is to use
some deterministic/democratic process; majority rule
is in this category, though it's clearly not a good option.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a sort of fractal voting
idea by John McCarthy; I have always been curious to
see how it works in practice.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/politics/voting.html

Anyway... if we don't see a whole lot more trust and
cooperation than I've seen lately, we'll either have
to leave a bunch of stuff unspecified or get creative
about decision-making processes.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 27 April 2007 15:32:16 UTC