PROF, Conneg and normative sections

All,

I've been doing a close reading of the Conneg document, mainly with copy
editing in mind. During those, I noticed that it appears that the
profiles vocabulary (PROF) is integrated into normative sections of the
document, in particular section 7.3.1.1 and Appendices, in particular
A.1. These appear to be normative based on the conformance section
statement:

"As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines,
diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative.
Everything else in this specification is normative."

It is inadvisable to move Conneg to CR with a non-normative document
(PROF) in normative sections of the document. By "inadvisable" it really
means that it is unlikely to be approved for CR. The reason for this is
that once a document becomes a recommendation it is very costly and
difficult to make changes to it - basically, it is like the process that
we have gone through between DCAT v1 and DCAT v2 - a charter, group
formation, and an entirely new recommendation path. Having Conneg depend
on a vocabulary "in progress" definitely puts Conneg at risk, and would
require convincing W3C management, who will likely challenge the
proposed recommendation, that this is a good idea.

We should not move Conneg forward "as is" but there are various options
we can consider for Conneg, some of which are:

1. Move sections referring to PROF to non-normative areas of the document.
2. Remove references to PROF.
3. Advance Conneg as a working group note rather than CR track.

There may be other options I haven't thought of, but these seem to be
the most obvious ones.

Lars, I look especially to you to let us know what you prefer or at
least what you see as being the best option or options.

I have registered this as issue #1118

https://github.com/w3c/dxwg/issues/1118

kc
-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Monday, 7 October 2019 18:09:56 UTC