Re: Publishing the HTML 5 draft

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:51:28 +0200, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>  
wrote:

> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>  The Working Group has been in the running for over half a year now. I  
>> think it would be good if we published the HTML 5 draft[1] to let the  
>> outside world know what we're looking at and what we're working on to  
>> improve. Maybe in addition we could publish the HTML 5 differences from  
>> HTML 4 draft[2] which informally documents the differences between HTML  
>> 5 and HTML 4. (I've updated that document recently to reflect the  
>> latest changes to the HTML 5 draft.)
>> ...
>
> But then, what keeps us from finishing what we wanted to finish first?

The fact that it takes a long time. Long enough to be leaving the public  
(i.e. everyone who doesn't read the CVS log and mailing list) in the dark  
about what actual changes are occurring, what are the live issues, etc.  
W3C Process is based on a requirement to publish a reference snapshot  
regularly - the nominal period is every three months which is meant to  
give a balance between often enough to be within cooee of what the working  
group is actually doing, while infrequent enough to let people spend the  
time required to read and think abou t without changing the ground under  
their feet so often they can never settle with a draft and enough time to  
review it.

This is paticularly important in the case of people who speak little  
english. I work with a large spanish-speaking community (bigger then the  
HTML WG, representing most countries where spanish is spoken and a few  
where it isn't much) who have a vital interest in the HTML specification,  
but whose english, on average, is insufficient for them to follow the  
discussion at all. The only way to allow these people to provide feedback  
is to translate something, and present it. The approach I would expect is  
to translate the draft differences note, and use that as a guide for  
people who can then ask for more detailed explanations/translations of  
particular sections of the document (I doubt we wil translate the entire  
draft of HTML in 3 months).

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 Monday, 22 October 2007 16:29:22 UTC