Withdrawal of HTML5-warnings draft

Noting that the current poll demonstrates that consensus would be
difficult to achieve[1] regarding the publishing of the HTML5-warnings
draft, I am withdrawing it as a candidate for publishing as a heartbeat
WD for HTML WG.

There are a number of interesting data points that came out of the poll
data:

1) The biggest problem seemed to be a lack of consistency with which
   warnings were provided as well as the warning language. Even though
   more consistent rules were applied to the second draft, the changes
   were not enough. The next draft that I author will apply a consistent
   set of rules for warnings and status markers. For example, a
   combination of WHAT WG status markers and all ISSUES from the HTML WG
   issue tracker older than X months).
2) Publishing more than one WD at a time seems to be a very unpopular
   way forward. It may be that publishing non-normative differences
   as WDs are problematic, or it may be that publishing more than
   one WD is seen as confusing... but the issue is not as
   uncontroversial as Ian, Sam and I had hoped it would be.
3) The issue seemed to be divisive, with many people voting for one
   WD and not the other.
4) Since respondents could see the poll results before the poll was
   over, the results may have been subject to block voting (for both
   drafts).
5) I had not seen any opposition or support from a number of the voters
   that voted, prior to voting. It's concerning because they provided no
   feedback, have made very few posts to HTML WG (if any) over the past
   several months, but still voted on the spec. Both drafts received
   these votes, and we have no idea if the people that voted had read
   the thread in detail or truly understood what they were voting for.
   There are several examples where it is clear that the voters were not
   tracking the discussion on this mailing list.
6) The poll was fairly close, so there is a non-trivial number of people
   that care about warning/status language being published with the
   HTML5 spec.

The next step is to iterate on the current HTML5-warnings draft and
create a mechanism that is programmatic that inserts the proper warning
text, from both the WHAT WG status tracker and HTML WG issue tracker (as
an overlay) to the W3C published spec. Once the "issue consistency"
problem is addressed, HTML5 community feedback will be encouraged in
order to determine if there are more improvements that will be required
when publishing warning/stability text along with the HTML WG draft.

-- manu

[1] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/wd08/results

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.1 Released - Browser-based P2P Commerce
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/06/29/browser-based-p2p-commerce/

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 06:00:27 UTC