Re: Proposed requirement: don't break the Web

On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 15:35 -0700, L. David Baron wrote:
> [ Although Dan's message asking for requirements [1] didn't
> explicitly ask for requirements for things that already work, I'm
> going to send a few (along with a few others).  I think there's
> value in agreeing on what we want to keep working so that we
> understand why we're not doing certain things. ]
> 
> 
> Proposed requirement:
>   New versions of HTML must not break significant numbers of Web
>   pages.
[...]

This is pretty well justified, and several have chimed in to support
it.

My only quibble is that, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to
use the word "requirement" for things that are objectively
verifiable. This looks more like a goal or an objective, to me.

I could be made into a requirement with the addition of some
objective metrics, but I'm not sure that's worth doing.


This does raise a question in my mind... is anyone interested
to edit a requirements document? I think it could be useful,
particularly in negotiating dependencies with other groups.
A good way to volunteer would be to draft an outline and
send it to the group.

Again, for reference, some thoughts on requirements
documents...
  http://esw.w3.org/topic/RequirementsDocument

It's world-writeable.



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Sunday, 25 March 2007 03:00:05 UTC