Re: Moving past last call for HTML5

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> You must have some history with Larry that I'm unaware of

No history with Larry. History within the W3C with other people, though, 
yes (such as the sXBL debacle I described).


> [...] and frankly the above is at odds with my previous understanding of 
> how you operate (which I would have characterized as "fact based" rather 
> than the more horse-trading approach I see described above).

Unfortunately with purely subjective sections like the one under 
discussion I'm not really sure it's possible to have a truly fact-based 
approach. I'm very happy to be shown wrong on this of course.


> I don't believe that the next release of HTML will be the last release 
> of HTML.  This is true whether it be called 4.1 or 4.5 or 5.  I suspect 
> it will be externally called 5 but with a feature set that you would be 
> more comfortable calling 4.1.  I don't want to rathole on naming.

Ok. The draft I'm interested in taking to last call is the one that has 
the features that people are asking for and implementing, so that's what 
I've been talking about. Does that change your advice on what I should do 
by October or what your expected timetable is for dealing with the 
currently known issues?


> Given the rate of change, the inattention to heartbeat requirements, and 
> the rather widespread perception that this group is not exactly open to 
> input, I believe that this document has not gotten the attention it 
> deserves.  Only after these items have been resolved will we start 
> hearing about the real issues.

Wow, if receiving thousands of pieces of separate feedback isn't what you 
consider "hearing about the real issues", I can't imagine how much 
feedback you're actually expecting!

Note that the expected result (and basically the point) of "last call" is 
indeed to trigger a deeper review cycle. Does that help with your take on 
the timetable? (That is, we only have to be done dealing with the issues 
we know about to transition to Last Call; then we are expected to get more 
feedback, and only once we've dealt with all of that new feedback -- the 
"real issues" you speak of, I assume, are we expected to go to Candidate 
Recommendation, the next stage in the process.)


> I don't see any individual item beyond that which -- in isolation -- 
> could not be addressed by October.

That's good to hear. Is there somewhere to track progress on this? I don't 
really know how to read the issue tracker page, and it would be helpful to 
have metrics to see progress so that I can see whether we're on track or 
not (similar to the graph of pending e-mails I have).

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

Received on Saturday, 21 February 2009 06:15:46 UTC