Re: ACTION-687: references to expired RFCs, etc.

I'm not involved in this and we don't need more cooks. All I saw was
that you sent out a draft

    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2012Apr/0185.html

and there was quite a bit of followup (15 messages) including helpful
email from Ian and Thomas, but no conclusion and no revised draft.
Larry suggested something somewhat different from what you wrote:

[[LM:
the tag discussed the general issue of normative references, and I had
thought, at least temporarily accepted the resolution that the
guidelines in the QA rec would cover the situation. This incident is a
reminder that there is not anything in the W3C process to insure QA
guidelines are followed, even above the preferences of an editor or a
small but vocal subset of working group thinks otherwise: the costs
are borne by others not among the eager technicians pushing the latest
ideas and held back by stuffy ideas like "stable normative
references".

I suggest the tag ask the AB more generally about the process for
insuring our resolution affects the rec process. At what point are
specs required to have stable references, and what are the explicit
exception guidelines?

[...]
sory I didnt respond to your proposed note. This whole topic was not
[?] about the general case for which the sniffing case  was just a
clear example.

if there arent any rules and undated uri references are allowed then
we hve specs that have the same kinds of ambiguities....
]]

You didn't respond. So it didn't make sense to me to just have you
send your message without some kind of meeting of minds, and it also
didn't make sense to talk about it more at that particular TAG meeting
with Larry not present, so I said what I said:

"believe further iteration is needed. The iteration might lead to a
decision to do nothing, that would be ok"

which was the total of my involvement. Since the trail was hot that
day, I expected more email discussion, but it petered out.

LM didn't want meeting time on this, IIRC, and by "iteration" I didn't
mean to imply more meeting time, just for you and Larry (and whoever
else cares) to somehow come up with a plan of action or inaction.

Personally: 1. Reputable publishers have QA processes that are
independent of high-level editorial functions. 2. If a reference is to
a web page whose persistence is in doubt, a copy should be made with a
best effort attempt to make the copy persist. I've found quite a few
404s from references in Recommendations and I find this very annoying.

Jonathan

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:
> Jonathan:
>
> Do you have anything further on this? I would welcome some guidance (I come
> on this one each week as I consider agenda topics, and for the last few it's
> been on hold awaiting a response to my e-mail quoted below. For now, I'll
> bump it one more week).
>
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Noah
>
> On 5/1/2012 6:29 PM, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
>>
>> Jonathan:
>>
>> Assuming the draft minutes of last week's call [1] quote you correctly,
>> you
>> asked for more discussion of my:
>>
>> ACTION-687: on - Noah Mendelsohn - Look for opportunities to discuss
>> putting forward something to the AB about the Process and the failed
>> reference from REC drafts to expired RFCs as a side-effect of scope creep
>> etc. - Due: 2012-05-01 - OPEN
>>
>> ...and I indicated we should try to make progress in e-mail. Please
>> consult
>> the record of discussion up to this point, and let me know how you'd like
>> to proceed. Thank you very much.
>>
>> Noah

Received on Monday, 14 May 2012 22:35:54 UTC