- From: Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:25:43 +0900
- To: Nikunj Mehta <nikunj.mehta@oracle.com>
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Nikunj Mehta <nikunj.mehta@oracle.com>, 2008-11-18 17:09 -0800: > On Nov 17, 2008, at 5:36 PM, Ian Hickson wrote: > > > On Mon, 17 Nov 2008, Nikunj Mehta wrote: > >> > >> What Ian considers Platform core [1] as listed in [2] includes a wide > >> variety of things that don't have much to do with HTML at all. SQL > >> (5.10.2) and unstructured storage (5.10.1) are good examples. The only > >> reasons for keeping these parts in the HTML5 spec that I have seen are > >> that these pieces are stable and the same editor would be working on > >> these sections as the Platform Core. Neither sound good enough reasons > >> to me. > > > > They're not particularily good reasons, but splitting those two parts up > > would delay progress by a year or more, and that is unacceptable IMHO. > > Sorry but Hixie's opinion is not what decides the matter here. True -- what would help more to decide the matter would be if we had somebody step forward to take ownership of a particular part of the current draft and edit it as a separate document. As you noted in a previous message, "many decisions are based on available editors and required expertise." See Dan's earlier comments about "he who does the work...". Especially in the absence of any additional editors, it does matter quite a bit what Hixie's opinion is, since at this point he's the only who's written (and is maintaining and updating) an actual draft for most of the things that others have suggested should be split out (e.g., structured client-side storage). He's made the assertion that it's a significant amount of additional work for him himself to take any given part of the current draft and maintain it as a separate document. To me, it doesn't seem particularly reasonable to expect that he should choose to create additional work for himself -- or that the working group should try to compel him to -- in order to achieve an outcome that he and others here have questioned the value of -- that is, modularization of the current into separate physical documents, but one editor still maintaining it all. If your answer were to be that splitting the spec into separate physical documents would be a step toward getting additional editors on board to work on them, I guess I'd say an even shorter step would be interested potential editors to do the work of splitting out whatever part(s) they're have interest and expertise in, and then making those available to the group for review. > This just > totally tosses out my understanding of the W3C process out the window. IIUC, > the role of the editor is to take technical inputs about the specification > and weave it together into a coherent whole, That certainly seems to me to be pretty much what Hixie has been doing for the last 5 years or so now that he's been working on the various parts of the current HTML5 draft (including for more than 3 years before our current HTML WG existed). There is a history behind that way the current HTML5 draft evolved and the environment it evolved in and that led to the current HTML WG being chartered. My personal take on trying to document some significant milestones in that history is here: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/history I can't claim it's an objective or complete record in any way. It's just an attempt at trying to list out some of the events and interactions that got us to where we are now (or at least to where we were are the time the group was chartered). It seems worth mentioning here that Hixie did not become the driving force behind the work on this specification because somebody else gave him responsibility for working on it. It came about because he took initiative on it and responsibility for be it at a time when many others questioned whether it was even worth doing (and in some cases were focusing on alternative approaches to standards related to client-side technologies that have so far not had much success at getting implementation support in browsers) -- and kept at it working on it over several years, full time, in close communication with implementors to make sure the end result would be something that aligned with implementation realities and that had some practical chance of actually being implemented. I think all of us would like to see others take similar initiative and do the work of writing up drafts for parts of the spec they'd like to see split out (or for drafts that offer alternative specs to what's in the current HTML5 document), and to commit to the long-term process of doing ongoing direct discussion with implementors and others about the implementation details, and making refinements based on those discussions. > not also to define the process > and make decisions. The former is done by the W3C/WG and the latter by the > WG chairs based on consensus/up down vote. I think it is a mistake to see this as simply a battle between Hixie and consensus. (Though I will admit that I don't think some of Hixie's comments about his views on consensus have been a big help here.) Hixie in part represents a community; in large part, a community that was active in supporting and participating in the HTML5 work for quite a while before it was (re)integrated into the W3C and in which a number of implementors are very actively involved. The decision-making process that takes place with those implementors around the parts of the spec that relate to browser implementation behavior is not one of Hixie unilaterally making a decision about what he thinks is best. In fact, there are plenty of times when he's been overruled by implementors. I think most people in that community find the decision-making process that's been used around those parts of the spec to be working relatively well. A number of them have spoken up on here repeatedly to say so. That doesn't mean they're all completely happy with it -- I think a lot of people would prefer we had some additional editors involved in working on parts of the spec and managing decisions around them -- but that said, I certainly don't think anybody from that community would not want to see that process replaced by a simple consensus/up-down voting system. Anyway, such a voting system would ultimately not be effective at all for managing decisions around browser implementation details in the spec, because the implementors would simply just end up ignoring the spec if it did not align with what they were willing and able to actually implement. In that respect, I guess it could be said that they have a kind of collective de facto veto power. But all that said, it's not at all clear that process is the right one to use for managing decisions about all parts of what's in the current draft. In particular, neither browser vendors nor any other group has any kind of veto power about authoring-conformance- only parts of the spec that don't relate to browser implementation behavior, and it is certainly imaginable that the group could use a different decision-making process to manage decisions around those authoring-conformance parts. > BTW, where /is/ the HTML WG chair > in this period of tempest? Noting that there are two current co-chairs in this group: Chris Wilson and myself, which particular period of tempest do you mean? If you mean the flare-up from this particular thread, what sort of response from the chairs are you expecting? As far as I can see, there really has been no new information in thread than what we had on hand during the very first discussion we had on the first day of our face-to-face meeting last month: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/f2f/2008-10/#split-talk Probably the most significant thing that's happened since then to actually help us move forward was that Hixie took time to write up his take on a detailed evaluation of what parts of the current draft could potentially be split out and taken on by separate editors, along with an assessment about what level of effort would be needed to maintain each of those: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Oct/0127.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Oct/0128.html And as you can maybe imagine, I've had more than a few discussions off-list with individuals and representatives from a number of organizations, with the goal of getting some commitments of additional editors. Some of those discussions are ongoing, but so far they obviously have not yet led to particular people stepping forward with drafts or making any public commitments to do so. I guess it would also be fair to say that I think additional (or even alternative) leadership in the group would not be totally unwelcome. I've talked off-list with people who have experience elsewhere in producing successful standards about the possibility of stepping in to help with guiding the work of the group. But we don't exactly have people lining up to volunteer for that either. The draft markup spec I put together is in part an attempt at trying to lead by example a little -- in that there has been some potential need expressed for a separate language spec without a focus on browser implementation details, and nobody else had stepped forward to produce a draft to try to address that. So I figured I would give it a try myself. I hope that in part it helps to give others some encouragement to produce separate/alternative drafts for some of the others spec sections that we've all be discussing -- or even another alternative draft for the language/markup spec, if they think the one I put together is too far off the mark to be useful. Anyway, just to get back to noting what you wrote about this being a period of tempest: Depending on how you look at it, this particular tempest has been going on for a number of years now, and we are in the midst of dealing with some consequences of decisions that can be seen as having led to it. Take a look at the events in http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/history in 1998 that related to whether XML should have draconian error handling; in 1998 and 1999, decisions that were made then about whether to extend and maintain the core HTML language further; or in 2002, the decisions to work instead on a replacement for HTML and some related specs that weren't backwards-compatible with existing browsers and Web content and that browser vendors did not see as aligning with implementation realities and market realities; the decision to have a workshop on Web Applications in 2004 that had the effect of further alienating browser vendors and moving work outside of the W3C... I think the period of tempest we are in can be seen in part as a consequence of some decisions that led to the work on HTML5 starting outside of the W3C, and that led to a community being formed around that work while it was only being done outside the W3C, with a relatively successful (as far as implementation success) decision-making process being adopted to guide the work. And then the W3C as a community got re-involved in the work alongside the community that had been supporting it all along during the years in between, and it's now become clear that the norms of those two communities and the goals of some members of each are not always well aligned. I think we can do more to try to bring them into closer alignment, though we're never going to smooth out all the differences. Another reason I put the draft markup spec together was with the expectation that it could end up being something that would help to encourage and facilitate discussion and closer participation in decision-making from people in the group/community who aren't participating in discussions and decision-making around the parts of the spec that deal with browser-implementation details -- including people in the community, outside of the group, who have basically dropped out/ tuned out from the group's discussion a long time ago because they've not be happy with the focus of the work, or with the process, or the list culture, or whatever. --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://people.w3.org/mike/
Received on Wednesday, 19 November 2008 09:26:20 UTC