Re: edits to the draft should reflect the consensus of the WG

The fact that WG members felt the need to engage in meta-discussion
like this indicates that the chairs are not doing enough to manage
expectations.

That's unfortunate, but I don't think I'll go as far as to
offer an apology; we're doing our level best. It's not clear
that any two people could do enough to keep 450+ people
from getting frustrated about how we work.

In order to keep public-html@w3.org focussed on the technical
work of this group, I encourage everyone to take process
issues up directly with the involved people and/or the chairs.

Note that some meta/process issues are due to the limitations
of email, so consider attending a WG teleconference to get
a better feel for what the chairs and some other WG members
are thinking about timing, schedules, and such. Also, if you
send me mail asking for a phone call, I'll do what I can to
accommodate that. Sometimes the near-realtime feedback of IRC
helps (sometimes it hurts, on the other hand.)

About this specific case...

On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 23:07 -0500, Robert Burns wrote:
> 
> On Aug 15, 2007, at 10:43 PM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> 
> [...]
> >  There's no need to write a long  
> > rant, fighting for accessibility every time something is added to  
> > the draft which wasn't as well written or thought out as intended.   
> > If you just attribute a little bit of good faith to Hixie's  
> > intention, and calmly point where the spec can be improved, the  
> > discussion and outcome will be much more productive.
> 
> I think the point you're missing here Lachlan is that the editor is  
> supposed to make edits to the draft that reflect the consensus of the  
> WG.

It's our goal to reach consensus eventually, but I'm flexible
on whether that happens before or after the editor updates the
editor's draft.

In fact, the charter encourages the editor(s) to lead:

"We expect that typically, an editor makes an initial proposal, which is
refined in discussion with Working Group members and other reviewers,
and consensus emerges ..."
 -- http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html#decisions

The process of working on issues is still rather chaotic; the chairs
have not put *any* design questions to the WG formally, so don't
have any established rhythm there. I don't have as good feel as
I'd like for which issues the editor is putting priority on, and
I can imagine lots of other WG members feel similarly and are
frustrated about it.

But please, if you find yourself writing something like this...

> [...] The  
> editor didn't even bother to try to understand the feature before  
> deciding it should be changed.

... count to 10, take a break, and don't send it to 450+ inboxes
plus an archive.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 17 August 2007 16:24:41 UTC