Re: Planning to close EXPath Community Group due to inactivity unless we hear from you

+1 to what Liam says.

In particular, Liam notes:

    In principle it could be a single group, but that isn't how it's
    been organised in the past, with different goals and different
    people taking the lead.

I think this is an important point.

By nature, something like EXSLT can be more hospitable to minority
interests than the group responsible for the QT specs can be.  In specs
like XSLT and XQuery there is usually a rather high bar for features
that will be of use to some but not all users, and a high bar for making
features optional.  In EXSLT, every extension is by nature optional, and
if a small fraction of the population may benefit from agreeing on the
form of a particular extension, it may make sense to define that
extension in EXSTL even though that extension would not have a prayer of
being adopted by the QT4 WG.

Having two distinct groups helps make the difference in their goals
clearer.

If the ongoing cost to W3C of a quiescent community group is high, then
the cost/benefit ratio may be unpropitious.  But the alternative costs
are potentially also high: the cost of later starting a new group from
scratch to continue the work of the old discontinued group, or the
(intangible, I guess) cost to W3C of people deciding that W3C is not
where certain work is going to be done.

Weren't community groups sold at the outset as a way for W3C to support
some kinds of technical work at minimal cost to the consortium?  If the
ongoing cost to W3C of quiet groups is high enough to merit Ian's
attention, I wonder what went wrong with the original idea.  (Or
possibly how I managed to misunderstand the original idea.)

Michael Sperberg-McQueen

"Liam R. E. Quin" <liam@fromoldbooks.org> writes:

> On Mon, 2024-07-01 at 08:36 -0500, Ian Jacobs wrote:
>> 
>> I’d like to focus on the question: what value is the group providing?
>> 
>> If the group is providing value, then it would be great to understand
>> what that is, and to communicate to more people who might also want
>> to participate.
>
> The EXPath specs are widely implemented and are used not only in XSLT
> but in raw XPath, in XQuery implementations, and elsewhere.
>
> The CG is quiescent right now because there hasn't been any change in
> XPath or XSLT since the 2016/2017 W3C recommendations.
>
> The documents are consulted (you're more likely to know how often than
> i, but i know they are used).
>
> It’s my expectation that we will start to see updates, probably later
> this year or early next year would be my guess.
>
> The work is separate from XSLT and XQuery and base XPath; however, we
> do have a single group (qt4) for work on XSLT and XQuery and XPath. So
> there are really only two groups, not lots, for this work. There’s a
> lower threshhold for the expath work, as not all implementations are
> required to support it.
>
> In principle it could be a single group, but that isn't how it's been
> organised in the past, with different goals and different people taking
> the lead.
>
> If they were combined (and documents could still be updated in both of
> course), would EXPath become some sort of subgroup?
>
> I would not be surprised to see expath membership increase when there's
> new activity. The group exists to fill in gaps needed by users but that
> are not filled in by the main specifications, for a number of reasons,
> in some cases because of a lack of consensus. So combining the groups
> might actually block expath from going forward.
>
> Sorry for a long answer; i hope that's clearer.


-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

Received on Friday, 5 July 2024 15:20:06 UTC