Re: This Working Group needs a Secretary

Sam brings up a lot of valid points from his experience with bodies
defining standards. There have been some chaotic efforts to manage
this via the Wiki and even by the Editors themselves but there is
clearly a lot of confusion (both in and outside of this working group)
about what is going on with HTML 5.

I eagerly volunteer to help with this effort. (though I am not sure
*one* person alone can tackle it)

----

In addition it might be helpful to an organize those who offered to
help with use case research and development. We need to fill out the
background story on the issues with the spec as the arise and the
Editors are constantly suggesting that they need more existing data to
review. I do respect that many people don't have time or even access
to the resources necessary to do this type of in-depth research - not
everyone have access to millions of HTML documents that could be
loaded into a text retrieval engine and scanned for occurrences of
particular tags.

It would be amazingly helpful if Google could open source some of the
tools & data used to make their [Web Authoring Stats report][1].

(That said, I happen to work at place that collects terabytes of
content for linguistics research and I know getting the IP rights to
release our web data only for purposes of HTML research would be
difficult. [We did work with Google to get a corpus out of them][2]
but it was aimed at linguistics research and I believe it has all of
the HTML markup stripped.)

[1]: http://code.google.com/webstats/
[2]: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html

Received on Saturday, 25 August 2007 19:08:45 UTC