Thoughts regarding Maciej's compromise and the heartbeat publication

Please forgive me if I'm not using proper "W3C terminology" here, I'm very
much so an outsider to most of this process and such.

First and foremost, given some of the things that have been said here in the
last few days, I find it extremely encouraging to see Maciej's compromise
proposal, and John's response to it. Will it satisfy everyone? Of course
not, but that is the nature of a compromise. Having read through the
messages from the last few days, as someone with no positions to defend or
personal preferences on the matter, I believe that it is a good compromise.
I am not an accessibility expert by any means, but I think that both sides
to this discussion have a good amount of merit, and as a result, I highly
doubt that it will ever be conclusively resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
All the same, the compromise that Maciej and John are working on definitely
seems to be the best possible resolution *in order to move forwards with the
heartbeat publication*. Is it the best solution moving forwards? No clue.
But in terms of dealing with all of the remaining, stated objections to the
current draft being published (namely, not contradicting WCAG), it seems
that it will fit the bill, now that Maciej and John are working together on
it.

Let's look back to a few days ago. Sam outlined 5 possible courses to take.
Other than publishing John's draft in parallel to Ian's draft, to make sure
that John's objections were taken seriously, all were retracted/rejected.
Therefore, if John's objections can be satisfied with Maciej's proposal (and
he says that they can be, with some changes, and they have agreed to work
together on them), and Ian incorporates the proposal into his draft, then
all paths other than "publish Ian's draft" have been eliminated, and there
is no need for a poll/vote.

If I'm way off base here, I'd like to know. But from my perspective as a
relative lurker here, I think that the discussion around this issue has
grown beyond the scope of the original issue (whether or not to publish a
heartbeat document, and which one(s) to publish), and that in reality, we
are actually quite close to resolving this.

J.Ja

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 06:35:14 UTC