Re: improved HTML fragment identifiers

Hi again Erik,

> @2008-06-06 17:21 -0700:
> most importantly, i am  wondering whether people think this is a
> bad idea and should not be  done, or whether people think this
> simply would not be implemented  and/or useful. so i don't
> expect anybody to suddenly become enthusiastic  about this idea,
> but just hearing some of the reasons for the lack of  enthusiasm
> would be interesting as well.

I encourage you to not get discouraged :)

What I mean is, not get discourage by the lack of response so far.

We have a lot of different discussions going on on this list at
any given time -- and in the large volume of traffic, I know it's
easy for people to sometimes just miss something that they
otherwise would have taken time to read and respond to on a
lower-traffic list.  Part of it is sometimes just plain good/bad
timing (e.g., if you are lucky to post to the list when things are
at a lull, more people are likely to make special notice of it).

So, anyway, there's nothing wrong with you sending out this
reminder after your initial message not getting the kind of
feedback you might've hoped for. I think you are likely to get
more feedback this time. But even if you don't, we will have it on
record in the bugzilla, and you can send out another reminder
about it again some time later if you choose.

Sometimes to get some traction on a proposal like this, it takes
more than just writing up a sound proposal and having some good
technical arguments. As an example: A year or more ago, my friend
Ryan Sarver put a lot of time and energy into writing up a
proposal and API outline for a geolocation API. He then spent
time posting to lists and talking to people to do some awareness-
raising about it is to see what interest he could muster up.

But I think he would say that during the last year, it didn't
catch on nearly as much as he would have hoped for -- didn't get
the interest needed to really move it forward. But fast forward to
just a few weeks ago, when it seemed like a critical mass of
attention came together that led in a relatively short time to a
decision by the W3C to form a specific new Geolocation Working
Group that Ryan's work has informed in a valuable way already and
that I'm sure it will continue to inform.

What I mean is, there was nothing wrong with the proposal that
Ryan floated over a year ago. It just took some time for other
things outside his or anybody else's control to get us around to
collectively realizing the importance of having a geolocation API.

There's really not much that he or I or anybody else could have done
in the mean time to make things get aligned faster than they did.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
http://sideshowbarker.net/