Re: Consensus. was: Re: a/@ping discussion (ISSUE-1 and ISSUE-2), was: An HTML language specification vs. a browser specification

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008, Dean Edridge wrote:
> Julian Reschke wrote:
> > Dean Edridge wrote:
> > > Julian Reschke wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > But volume of comments can be an indicator of whether something 
> > > > has consensus or not.
> > > > 
> > > > [...]
> > > > 
> > > > ... that clearly is not stable, nor has consensus, and also could 
> > > > *easily* be specified separately.
> > > 
> > > Consensus among whom?
> > 
> > Consensus in the HTML WG.
> 
> So the people in the HTML WG are the only ones contributing to HTML5 
> then?

As far as I'm aware, so far the opinions of people on the HTML WG have 
been representative of the opinions of people on other lists and in 
general in the wider community, so consensus in the HTML WG is probably a 
reasonable indicator of wider consensus, at least in the absence of 
evidence to the contrary.

I'm not aware of any decision that has yet been made that didn't have a 
majority agreement, and the implementations are following the spec as it 
evolves (i.e. we do have "rough consensus and running code").

Having said that, as editor I'm not actually aiming for consensus. 
Consensus simply isn't a good way to get technically solid specifications, 
and is in any case basically impossible to achieve in a group with 
hundreds of participants such as this one.

This has been said several times before:
   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Jul/0354.html

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

Received on Saturday, 22 November 2008 22:02:07 UTC