- From: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:05:58 +0200
- To: "Danny Ayers" <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, "Jeff Jaffe" <jeff@w3.org>
- Cc: "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch>, nathan@webr3.org, www-archive <www-archive@w3.org>, "Ian Jacobs" <ij@w3.org>
On Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:00:28 +0200, Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> wrote: > I would add to this discussion that we need to be mindful of where we > are in the development cycle. > > Certainly, in the early phases of development it does not yet make sense > to converge to a fixed point. We have now recognized that reality and > have introduced Community Groups to facilitate specification development > in areas of rapid innovation which are too early for standardization. > > And I agree Danny, that as a spec matures and stabilizes, it is quite > useful for the ecosystem to converge to a fixed point - a versioned > spec. And to be sure, there will continue to be innovation beyond which > would lead to the next version. For convergence you typically need to specification to evolve as well. Because with convergence you typically get better understanding of the problem space and holes in the specification. (And then parts of specifications become obsolete if we later decide on an alternative way of doing something, and it would be beneficial if specifications were updated directly to reflect that new direction so people do not end up implementing the wrong thing. E.g. that can happen now (and does happen) with HTML4, DOM1*, DOM2*, DOM3*, CSS1, etc.) -- Anne van Kesteren http://annevankesteren.nl/
Received on Thursday, 18 August 2011 13:06:40 UTC