Re: Cross-posting etiquette

On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> On Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:20:33 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> 
> > It has been brought to my attention that my recommendation to not 
> > cross- post replies to my bulk replies that are themselves 
> > cross-posted to many mailing lists may have been taken as some sort of 
> > bad faith behaviour to reduce the visibility of any rebuttals.
> 
> Without making any accusations of good or bad faith, I have noticed that 
> once again your replies to various emails which include the fact that 
> changes are made to the spec do not necessarily get posted to this 
> group.
> 
> The effect is to reduce the transparency of the HTML spec development to 
> the HTML Working Group, by forcing them to follow at least the WHAT-WG 
> in order to see the issues and explanations that lead to changes being 
> introduced.
> 
> Would you be able, as editor for this working group, to add this wrking 
> group to the recipients in such messages you send?

No.

I get feedback from dozens of places. If I started cc'ing all the feedback 
to public-html, it would result in an order of magnitude more traffic to 
this list. I honestly do not think that is what people want.

I send responses to feedback to the place where the feedback was 
originally sent. In addition, all checkins result in mail to two mailing 
lists and a notification is sent to twitter. People have even sent up 
blogs that syndicate the e-mails I send in response to feedback, which can 
be followed if people want to keep track of my responses. There's also a 
site that not only shows every recent checkin, with diffs, but even has 
icons that indicate who is affected by the changes and how stable the 
affected sections are. All of these tools can be accessed either from 
links directly in the header of the spec or from pages that are but one or 
two clicks from there.

That is plenty enough notice for everyone to be quite capable of tracking 
the development of the spec if they want to.

Given all this, and given that people have actually complained about me 
cross-posting to the public-html list in the past, I intend to only reply 
to feedback to the forums to which it was sent. Sometimes that's the 
WHATWG list, sometimes it's the HTMLWG list, sometimes it's a bug in a bug 
database, or a blog comment on a blog, or a comment on reddit, or a 
private e-mail, or an IRC comment, or face-to-face, or a passing thought.

If there are changes that are made that someone disagrees with, then they 
should raise that (in whatever forum they think appropriate) and I will 
take that technical feedback into account just like I do all other 
feedback.

This is in line with how I said I would operate when my services were 
originally requested by the HTML working group.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 9 July 2008 11:26:45 UTC