Re: Prioritisation

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 12:07 AM, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote:

> looking at the prioritisation at
>
>
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15IsDMPwSXx197Iqe4I9xh7K8anmJ5c0-OFEG7w0LHYM/edit?usp=sharing
>
> i found myself  wondering what the priorities mean, and how they were
> arrived at.
>

Hi Richard,

The spreadsheet was used to gather information as this work was being
started. The main effort is now directed towards this HTML document:

http://w3c.github.io/dpub-pagination/priorities.html


> what they mean: could a low priority mean that work is under way to
> provide the functionality in question, and that therefore additional work
> is a low priority? Or does it mean that it is felt that this is a less
> important feature to have than others.  Presumably the latter would imply
> that, when bandwidth is limited, work should be directed elsewhere first;
> but once that high priority work is completed, does the priority change for
> the low priority features?  In other words, are all the features really
> important, but just less urgent than others?  Or are the low priority
> features really not terribly important?
>

The new document has divided the features into three categories:

1. Well-defined features with multiple implementations, but that are not
yet available in all browsers.
2. Features requiring further spec work
3. Features requiring design and architectural decisions before specs can
even be written.

This informs what sort of action we need to take--for #1, we need to lobby
Safari to implement font-feature-setting!


>
> how arrived at: who decided on the prioritisation, how was it done, and
> what communities do they represent? Some features are presumably likely to
> be of higher priority to certain subgroups – an easy example being vertical
> text, which got a high priority rating during the workshop in Japan, which
> was mostly attended by CJK folks, but is perhaps not so urgent in the
> West.  How is that factored into the prioritisation?
>

I made the initial decisions about priority, with some input from other
members of DPUB, as well as asking everyone I know on Twitter :). In
general, the highest priority things are either widely applicable
(font-feature-settings can be used in so many ways by many different
communities) or are absolutely fundamental to specific communities (like
vertical text). Some of the lower-priority features are either incremental
improvements (better control over hyphenation) or things that only affect
smaller communities (merging page number ranges in indexes).

But further input both on priorities and what should be listed is welcome!


>
> i suspect it would be useful to point to or include some text to describe
> these things for people looking at the spreadsheet.
>

Agreed. Thanks so much for bringing this up!


> Dave