Re: Publishing the HTML 5 draft

On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:28:25 +0200, Geoffrey Sneddon  
<foolistbar@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 18 Oct 2007, at 17:29, T.V Raman wrote:
>
>> I dont understand what "publishing" means, since the documents
>> are public -- wasn't that the whole point about working in public?
>
> Publishing them as a technical report (something that we are required to  
> do every three months, though we were granted an extension to the end of  
> August for the first, a date that has long since past).

One reason for doing this is that people who are very busy working on  
other stuff most of the time (such as developers of browsers and authoring  
tools, or authors of "how to do Web development" books and websites), or  
who find it difficult to read large technical drafts in english in the  
first place, or for some other reason don't manage to follow the  
day-to-day changes to the draft for whatever reason the editor sees fit at  
the time, may find it difficult to provide feedback at appropriate points  
early enough in the development process.

Publishing a formal W3C Technical Report, which happens every few months,  
gives people a reasonably stable reference to work from. THe cost of  
getting repeated omments based on such a draft is generally lower than the  
cost of not getting any comment until the Working group thinks it is done  
and then having an important issue raised which requires some major new  
thinking.

> We can go on discussing the documents endlessly: this is a working  
> draft. It's a _draft_. There's no way every single issue in every single  
> draft will be addressed before it is published as a draft.

Indeed. I hope that at the same time we will publish a draft of the note  
about the differences between the current draft and the previous HTML  
recommendation (and that future public drafts will have a reasonably  
complete summary of the changes from public draft to public draft). This  
also helps people to efficiently provide relevant comments, and thus  
reduces the amount of excess mail we have todeal with in the working group.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals              Try the Kestrel - Opera 9.5 alpha

Received on Friday, 19 October 2007 01:15:09 UTC