Re: [widgets] Seeking comments on Last Call WD of Widgets: APIs and Events spec; deadline 15 Sept 2009

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann<derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
> * Arthur Barstow wrote:
>>On August 18 a Last Call Working Draft of the Widgets: APIs and
>>Events spec was published:
>>
>>  <http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-widgets-apis-20090818/>
>
>>As Marcos noted at [1], the title is misleading since the spec no
>>longer defines Events. This error will be corrected before the
>>document's next publication.
>
> The Last Call Announcement is premature for that reason and because the
> changes to the document have not received adequate review. These changes
> are not clearly indicated as required either, in fact, the pointer to
> the rather inadequate CVS logs (e.g., the removal of showNotification is
> listed only as "Editorial cleanup") goes to the wrong document.
>
> The lack of review should be obvious from the errors in nearly all the
> examples: in 6.5.1 it uses made-up schemes without pointing that out in
> any way, 6.4.2 invokes a .forEach method on a NodeList that a NodeList
> is not defined to have, in 6.4.1 the JSON code is malformed due to usage
> of the wrong quote marks, and 6.1.1 fails to escape the markup it
> attempts to insert, leading to undesired effects if special characters
> are used in the values.

Well, seems that we now have adequate review :)

But seriously, I'll admit we have a problem within this group in
regards to pre-LC reviews. In the case of Working Drafts, the
author/editor is usually the only person checking documents before
they get published. However, we always put out a one week call for
consensus to give people a chance to review - and on the rare occasion
we do get reviews. My experience is that [first] Last Call is the
first real opportunity to get proper technical review (that is, that's
when we cross our fingers and hope the Bjoern Hoehrmann's of the W3C
will rip the spec apart - oh man! you don't want to know the amount of
begging, nagging, and bribing I've had to do at times to get documents
reviewed - reviews don't come easy or cheap; we ain't the HTML-WG, you
know!:)).

I'm not sure how we can rectify the current review problem (for
instance, one of the other editors of the spec said that he had fixed
the JavaScript examples a few weeks ago). Explicitly allocating tasks
to members does not seem to work because people don't volunteer or are
too busy. Regardless, through the trickle of reviews that we get
(compared, say, to the HTML-WG's volume of review), we still seem to
do ok.

Bjoern, if you want to nominate yourself as our pre-publication
filter, that would be great. However, if you can't for whatever
reason, then also consider that other people are busy to; we do what
we can with what little we have.

Kind regards,
Marcos
-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Thursday, 20 August 2009 09:17:58 UTC