- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:20:52 -0800
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>
On Dec 10, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Ian Hickson wrote: >> The current work on Microdata has not had wide support within this >> group. And perhaps even less outside this group. I can't see that this >> could worsen by being moved into another spec. And hence, Tab's premise >> is wrong. > > That's a complete non-sequitur. Tab's premise, and indeed Conway's law in > general, has nothing to do with how much support something has. It has to > do with technical design. Good grief! The premise would therefore be that nothing should ever be split because designs entirely accomplished by a single individual are inherently better than designs governed or supplied by a group. That may often be true, depending on the skills of the designer, but is hardly relevant once the design is submitted to a standardization body that is supposed to be representative of all WWW implementors. http://www.melconway.com/law/index.html Conway's law doesn't say that organizations should be avoided while doing technical design. It is an observation on the sociology of design and the nature of organizations. The only rational way to apply it to HTML5 is to note that the current specification matches the design of a single person within the echo chamber of a self-selected group of browser vendors, and that the WG is going to keep butting heads (fail to communicate) on these issues until we change it to a less monolithic design that will make better progress toward working group acceptance for standardization as HTML. In other words, Conway's law is more an argument for splitting Microdata into a separate specification, since then its design structure can mirror the small subset of folks that actually care about its design, and the rest of HTML5 can be focused on by the wider group. ....Roy
Received on Friday, 11 December 2009 03:21:33 UTC