Re: Whoah There, Turbo (and market share threshold, and charter changes)

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 07:53 +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, David Hyatt wrote:
> > 
> > My interpretation of what constitutes a browser vendor is based off the 
> > Success Criteria section of the charter:
> > 
> > "The HTML Working Group's work will be considered a success if there are 
> > two independent complete and interoperable implementations of its 
> > deliverable that are widely used (more than 10% of the Web browser 
> > market each according to at least two widely recognized metric reporting 
> > organizations)."
> 
> As others have noted, the W3C team silently made this criteria qualitative 
> instead of quantitative at the last minute. Why the team made this 
> decision is not public, but it seems fishy to me.

Well, the chartering process was pretty messy, yes.

But actually, why the team made this decision *is* public.

 "We strongly object to the 10% market share threshold in the
 Success Criteria."
  -- Apple's advice to W3C,
  quoted in the webkit weblog January 17th, 2007
  http://webkit.org/blog/?p=89

The comments include additional discussion.

That conversation was somewhat unofficial, but it is public.

(There's an official disposition of comments that is
W3C member-confidential.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-members/2007JanMar/0061.html )


>  How could we consider 
> this work a success if less than 10% of the market uses it? The reason the 
> W3C joined the HTML5 effort was specifically because the previous efforts 
> -- namely XHTML -- had failed to gain traction. Why wouldn't we want a 
> measurable goal?
> 
> Oh well.

Yeah; as far as the charter goes, oh well.

When we actually do make a request for Proposed Recommendation status,
I still hope we will have a compelling argument, based on widely
used statistics, that the spec is compatible with existing practice.

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

Received on Thursday, 15 March 2007 05:56:48 UTC