RE: Request to Revert revision 1.4525

> 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.

The WG Chairs have given you a clear instruction based on an agreed upon WG policy.  Please revert the change caused by revision 1.4525 immediately.

If this is not done by the end of the WG's Weekly teleconference this morning then the Chairs will cause this revert to occur without your assistance.

/paulc

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329


-----Original Message-----
From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ian Hickson
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 3:11 AM
To: Sam Ruby
Cc: HTML WG
Subject: Re: Request to Revert revision 1.4525

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.h
> tml

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.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2010 15:04:20 UTC