Branching of EME and MSE specs

The Chair, Team contact and Editors are discussing when we might branch the EME and MSE specifications so that one branch would be used for our Recommendation track deliverable and the other branch could be used for VNext features and work.

There are really two alternatives to consider here.  Creating a VNext branch when we enter final Candidate Recommendation (CR) stage permits earlier work on VNext features but at the cost of possibly needing to back-level editorial changes from the CR branch to the VNext branch.  Creating the VNext branch later ie when we enter Proposed Recommendation (PR) stage delays work on VNext features but also ensures that no back-level changes are needed between the two branches during the CR work.

Our current plan is to create a VNext branch for MSE and EME when we enter Proposed Recommendation stage in early August 2016 according to our timeline [1].  One major reason for doing this is that we have many editorial issues that we are planning to deal with in July when we are in CR and we want to avoid any additional workload for the Editors.

Your comments or questions on this plan are welcome.

/paulc
HME WG Chair

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2016May/0029.html