Re: Priority of Constituencies proposal

-1. I don't see this as being useful right now at all. A year ago, maybe. At this point in time for AS2, we are making decent progress again getting specific feedback from potential implementers and making improvements accordingly. All of the potential implementers who have spoken up have said that AS2 is at a good point but it just needs a few tweaks here and there. That is productive. What's being suggested here is not.

Sent from IBM Verse


   Harry Halpin --- Priority of Constituencies proposal --- 
    From:"Harry Halpin" <hhalpin@w3.org>To:public-socialweb@w3.orgDate:Mon, Oct 26, 2015 6:29 PMSubject:Priority of Constituencies proposal
  
 I was discussing with some Social Web developers why this group was as contentious, and it occured to me that one obvious problem is that we don't have a clear priority of constituencies. This "Priority of Constituencies" served HTML5 Working Group well, and I'd suggest we adopt it with one change that acknowlegdges that we do have three very different communities in the room trying to make a common interoperability format, each with different design preferences (i.e. JSON, microformats, and RDF). Here's the version from HTML [1]: "In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors; which in turn should be given more weight than costs to implementors; which should be given more weight than costs to authors of the spec itself, which should be given more weight than those proposing changes for theoretical reasons alone. Of course, it is preferred to make things better for multiple constituencies at once." It's rather common-sense but its important to be explicit about it. Now, I'd like to take an amendment. There's three groups, each of which have different definitions of theoretical purity: The JSON-using group who are not terribly attached to JSON-LD and the details of AS2.0 but are interested in a simple JSON format and has a number of implementers with a larger number of end-users than the microformat space, a micro-format community that prefers shipping around HTML with microformats and has very active implementers, and another group around RDF/Linked Data that has at least one active codebase. I suggest that we prioritize the demands for theoretical purity based on number of users/authors. Thus, we prioritize keeping JSON (ideally, as simple as possible) over microformats, and we prioritize microformats over RDF. My logic is the community that passes around JSON using HTTP URIs is magnitudes larger than the microformat community, and the microformat community is rather about equal in size to the RDF community - although the microformat community is more active in terms of number of implementers. However, I firmly believe the RDF community has valuable insights that need to be input into the space around the use of URLs and multiple schemas, and so the final specs should be acceptable to all communities. Yet if microformat or RDF-specific processing is required, that 'pain' should lie on the implementers who want to convert the format to RDF or to microformats, and not on the users, authors, and JSON-based implementers [roughly in that order]. I hope that makes sense and I think all communities will have to give and take, but that's what consensus is about. cheers, harry [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies/