Re: Request to Revert revision 1.4525

Ian hickson wrote:

"Holy overreaction, batman. I'm just having some publication issues and
didn't want people to be referencing an obsolete editor's draft in the
meantime. It'll be fixed when it's fixed. I really don't think it's a good
idea to have people referencing an obsolete draft in the meantime, though,
especially since there's a perfectly adequate alternative available that
I can point people to, so I've left it as-is for now."

I think the overreaction occured when the working draft was made unreadable
and the silly link was added to it.
The link you provided is not perfectly adequate as it is:

a) not a link to a HTML5 working draft
b) the linked document causes browsers to crash if one is not using the
right browser or the right version of a browser,  the right operating system
or the a machine with enough RAM or processing power.

regards
Stevef

On 28 October 2010 08:10, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, Sam Ruby wrote:
> >
> > Ian, the chairs have determined that the following change is likely to
> > reduce rather than increase consensus, and therefore per our
> > agreement[1] are requesting a speedy revert of the following change
> > pending resolution of the "publishing problem":
> >
> >
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-commits/2010Oct/0332.html
>
> Holy overreaction, batman. I'm just having some publication issues and
> didn't want people to be referencing an obsolete editor's draft in the
> meantime. It'll be fixed when it's fixed. I really don't think it's a good
> idea to have people referencing an obsolete draft in the meantime, though,
> especially since there's a perfectly adequate alternative available that
> I can point people to, so I've left it as-is for now. In the meantime I
> have some rather more important issues to deal with, such as fixing the
> bugs for which you specified a deadline.
>
> It's just an editor's draft, you know. As editor I'm not actually required
> to provide one at all. I could just provide snapshots by e-mail, or host
> raw source on my personal Web site.
>
>
> > And furthermore, we are asking that if you have a list of issues that
> > you feel need to be resolved, you enumerate them either on this list or
> > as bug reports.
>
> Well since we're on the topic of obsolescence, I think we should have a
> warning on the TR/ page that this draft is perennially obsolete as well.
> It's causing lots of problems with people referencing old (and
> known-wrong, since-fixed) text [1]. I'd added such a warning to the draft
> before we last published but for some reason you removed it.
>
> Furthermore, since you ask: There's plenty of other things I think should
> be resolved, for example all the problems with the issue process that I've
> raised in the past (and had dismissed), or the sheer number of absurd
> issues that you are letting reach the "poll" stage (What we should
> reference for ASCII? What the title of the AT annotations section should
> be? Really?), or the ludicrous situation of having three chairs instead of
> one (which means that anything involving the chairs ends up having to
> require a committee to make the decision, a situation seemingly taken
> straight out of the WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"), or the now
> perennial license issue, or the decisions that make no sense (q.v.
> Lachlan's analysis of the microdata decision [2]), or indeed the _months_
> it takes for you to make these simple decisions despite you then
> hypocritically asking me to do things "in a timely fashion" after just one
> day of the editor's draft not being updated... but really, I have no
> illusion that any of these will be fixed, and I'd much rather spend my
> time worrying about what matters: improving interoperability on the Web.
>
>
> [1] Most of the cases I'm aware of are in private communications with
> browser vendors (I often have people ask me questions privately), but a
> host of examples can also be found by searching list archives or your
> favourite search engine for references to the TR/html5 page. It's rather
> depressing how often people are running into things that we've already
> fixed, because they think the TR/ page is somehow useful. In practice,
> with openly-developed technologies like HTML, the TR/ page is actually a
> harmful anachronism that we really should do away with entirely. That's an
> issue for the W3C's staff, though, I don't suggest we try to fix it here.
>
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Jun/0017.html
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
>


-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

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