Re: CfC: FPWD of Web Messaging; deadline November 13

On Thu, 11 Nov 2010, Arthur Barstow wrote:
> 
> When WebApps re-chartered last Spring, Web Messaging was added to our 
> Charter thus there is an expectation we will publish it.

I really don't think that what our charters say sets much of an 
expectation. There would be much more concern over them being accurate if 
that was the case. :-)


> Assuming we get consensus to publish the FPWD, one way to move forward 
> with the publication would be for me [and Mike Smith if he's available] 
> to copy the latest ED and only make required changes to the text to pass 
> Pub Rules e.g. update the Status of the Doc section. Would that be OK?

Honestly I don't really see what value publishing this draft has. Just 
doing it because our charter says to do it is just bureaucracy for 
bureaucracy's sake. In any case, I do not think we should publish this 
draft without first solving these problems:

> > I'm also a bit concerned that every time we publish anything on the TR/
> > page, we end up littering the Web with obsolete drafts (since the specs
> > are maintained much faster than we publish them). I'd really rather just
> > move away from publishing drafts on the TR/ page at all, if we could
> > update the patent policy accordingly. I frequently get questions in
> > private e-mails from implementors who are looking at obsolete drafts on
> > the TR/ page about issues that have long been solved in the up to date
> > drafts on dev.w3.org or at the WHATWG.
> > 
> > If there wasn't such high overhead to publishing on the TR/ page, an
> > alternative would be to publish a new draft there frequently. In fact, the
> > best thing on the short term might be to publish a new REC-level draft
> > there every week or every month or some such (probably the best interval
> > would be whatever the patent policy's exclusion window is), since that
> > would actually make the patent policy work again. (Currently the patent
> > policy at the W3C is almost as useless as at the IETF since when we follow
> > the process properly, we almost never get to REC.)

These problems are technically easy to solve, only politics would prevent 
us from addressing them. I'm not really interested in discussing the 
politics, though. The problems are pretty obvious to anyone who's involved 
in the development of actively-used Web standards; IMHO it's just 
something W3C staff should fix, there's no need for any discussion really.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 11 November 2010 17:47:48 UTC