Working Group Decision on ISSUE-139 ack-microdata

The decision follows.  The chairs made an effort to explicitly address
all arguments presented in the Change Proposals on this topic in
addition to arguments posted as objections in the poll.

*** Question before the Working Group ***

There is a basic disagreement in the group as to whether the
acknowledgement to the microdata usability study should be placed in
the HTML5 or the Microdata specifications.  The result was an issue,
two change proposals, and a straw poll for objections:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/139
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Jan/0144.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Jan/0162.html
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-139-objection-poll/results

== Uncontested observations:

* The microdata spec would still have to refer to the HTML spec in the
   W3C space for the complete acks

This alone was not decisive.  There were people who supported either of
these proposals even after taking these facts into consideration.  The
fact that they were acknowledged up front was appreciated.

=== Objections

In terms of objections, we have confusion over whether Microdata is
part of the HTML5 language, an objection to excluding Microdata from
HTML5, and the amount of work required to move one sentence.

An important piece of context here is the decision for issue-76:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jan/att-0218/issue-76-decision.html

...which concludes with "the objections to picking a winner in this
case are stronger than the objections to not doing so."

The inclusion of an acknowledgement which is so obviously associated
with a separate specification for Microdata while not having equivalent
acknowledgements for RDFa has the effect of giving the impression of
picking a winner.  So the objection based on confusion was found to be
a valid objection.

Not having that acknowledgement within the HTML5 specification does not
exclude Microdata as a valid extension any more than not including the
RDFa acknowledgements in the HTML5 specfication excludes RDFa as a
valid extension.  So the objection on exclusion was found to be weak.

The amount of effort required to modify the spec generator to create an
ack section just for the microdata spec was not treated as a strong
objection.

*** Decision of the Working Group ***

Therefore, the HTML Working Group hereby adopts the "move a sentence
from the W3C HTML5 spec into the Microdata spec " Proposal for
ISSUE-139.  Of the Change Proposals before us, this one has drawn the
weaker objections.

== Next Steps ==

Bug 10718 is to be REOPENED and marked as WGDecision.

Since the prevailing Change Proposal does call for a spec change, the
editor is hereby directed to make the changes in accordance to the
change proposal.  Once those changes are complete ISSUE-139 is to be
marked as CLOSED.

== Appealing this Decision ==

If anyone strongly disagrees with the content of the decision and would
like to raise a Formal Objection, they may do so at this time. Formal
Objections are reviewed by the Director in consultation with the Team.
Ordinarily, Formal Objections are only reviewed as part of a transition
request.

== Revisiting this Issue ==

This issue can be reopened if new information come up. Examples of
possible relevant new information include:

* A desire by the editors of the RDFa in HTML specification to include
   analogous acknowledgements into the HTML5 specification.

=== Arguments not considered:

The following arguments were not considered: "wastes my time" and
"wasteful of the group's time".  The amount of time needed to create
the bug, create the issue, create the survey, and produce this decision
is not in question.  All of it could have been avoided by simply moving
the one sentence when it was first noted.

Received on Thursday, 24 March 2011 17:10:00 UTC