Re: Withdrawal of HTML5-warnings draft

On Aug 17, 2009, at 10:59 PM, Manu Sporny wrote:

> Noting that the current poll demonstrates that consensus would be
> difficult to achieve[1] regarding the publishing of the HTML5-warnings
> draft, I am withdrawing it as a candidate for publishing as a  
> heartbeat
> WD for HTML WG.

I think it's up to Sam whether to withdraw the poll. Here are a few  
comments on some of your coments.

>
> There are a number of interesting data points that came out of the  
> poll
> data:
>
> 1) The biggest problem seemed to be a lack of consistency with which
>   warnings were provided as well as the warning language. Even though
>   more consistent rules were applied to the second draft, the changes
>   were not enough. The next draft that I author will apply a  
> consistent
>   set of rules for warnings and status markers. For example, a
>   combination of WHAT WG status markers and all ISSUES from the HTML  
> WG
>   issue tracker older than X months).

I would support a draft incorporating status markers and HTML WG  
ISSUEs older than a certain age (and even new ISSUEs that have old  
email discussion). I believe it might be possible to add these markers  
in an automated way. I think James showed some prototype work towards  
that end, at least on adding the section maturity markers. Combined  
with cleaning out stale issues, this should put us in a good place for  
tracking our status as we approach Last Call.

I believe a draft along these lines could gain consensus.

> 2) Publishing more than one WD at a time seems to be a very unpopular
>   way forward. It may be that publishing non-normative differences
>   as WDs are problematic, or it may be that publishing more than
>   one WD is seen as confusing... but the issue is not as
>   uncontroversial as Ian, Sam and I had hoped it would be.

I was surprised by this myself. Sam has been promoting the idea of  
multiple independent drafts, and there hasn't been a lot of opposition  
in principle. But it seems like most of the Working Group is not on  
board with this idea, at least in the case of such minor differences.  
To me this says: we need to work harder on getting one draft that  
better reflects broader consensus.

> 3) The issue seemed to be divisive, with many people voting for one
>   WD and not the other.
> 4) Since respondents could see the poll results before the poll was
>   over, the results may have been subject to block voting (for both
>   drafts).

I think part of the split was due to an artifact in the poll  
construction. In particular, for people who were happy to publish both  
drafts, there was no way to express a preference in case only one  
ended up being published. Since the "only one draft" option took an  
early lead, at least some people chose to vote for only one draft to  
express their preference.

  - Maciej

> 5) I had not seen any opposition or support from a number of the  
> voters
>   that voted, prior to voting. It's concerning because they provided  
> no
>   feedback, have made very few posts to HTML WG (if any) over the past
>   several months, but still voted on the spec. Both drafts received
>   these votes, and we have no idea if the people that voted had read
>   the thread in detail or truly understood what they were voting for.
>   There are several examples where it is clear that the voters were  
> not
>   tracking the discussion on this mailing list.
> 6) The poll was fairly close, so there is a non-trivial number of  
> people
>   that care about warning/status language being published with the
>   HTML5 spec.
>
> The next step is to iterate on the current HTML5-warnings draft and
> create a mechanism that is programmatic that inserts the proper  
> warning
> text, from both the WHAT WG status tracker and HTML WG issue tracker  
> (as
> an overlay) to the W3C published spec. Once the "issue consistency"
> problem is addressed, HTML5 community feedback will be encouraged in
> order to determine if there are more improvements that will be  
> required
> when publishing warning/stability text along with the HTML WG draft.
>
> -- manu
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/wd08/results
>
> -- 
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
> President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Bitmunk 3.1 Released - Browser-based P2P Commerce
> http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/06/29/browser-based-p2p-commerce/
>

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 06:40:05 UTC