Re: historical background regarding success of responses to formal objections

On Mon, 2021-09-13 at 23:26 +0000, Ryan Grant wrote:
> 
> My question to this group is: historically, how do these things go?
> Do responses change outcomes? 

Sometimes


>  Does it work to collect responses into
> a document?  Do people in the W3C sit down and read all the emails in
> the mailing list?

You need to make a coherent response. The W3C  team will look at it; if
necessary, the team (the director) can override the objection,  or in
some cases the objector says they are satisfied.

In the 17 years i worked at W3C, the formal objections were
(1) "we [the objector] wanted to be on record as saying this but go
ahead and publish" (the most common);
(2) we [the objector] have a product, or are about to ship a product,
and the feature(s) in  this spec would cause problems in the short-term
for our product, and that's more important to us than the Web (no-one
will ever admit to this but it's not uncommon)
(3) we object to this spec, we prefer another approach, so here's a
bunch of fake objections to slow things down because we can't share our
actual business strategy
(4) we believe there's a technical problem with this spec, but we
didn't notice it over the past four years despite a last call  review
(this one is actually rare but does happen)


In general you can only satisfy some of these. I'm not going to say
publicly where i think the Mozilla objection lies, but, i hope the
editors and chairs have been able to arrange a joint phone call with
the objector, the outcome of which might be to invite someone from
Mozilla to join a Working Group call.

The WG response needs to show why the technical points have been
addressed are or not actually barriers, but it's also helpful if you
can work out the political or business-related barriers. For example,
it might just be someone at Mozilla who feels that since blockchain is
over-hyped there's nothing at all good in it, and anything that goes
remotely near it is bad. We certainly had objections like that in XML!

Best,

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org

Received on Monday, 13 September 2021 23:51:53 UTC