Re: biased surveys and other tricks

Hi Lachlan
Obviously, some people will find fault with it whatever way its
phrased, my main motivation was to get some input from outside the
closed shops of the HTML working group worlds.
rather than relying on the biased views of those intimately involved.

It has had the effect of more people actually viewing the 2 documents
who may not have otherwise:
http://shrinkster.com/13zy  (http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/)  	209 views
http://shrinkster.com/13zz
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/) 156 views

which can only be a good thing.

PS: you can track views of shrinkster URLs, which is where the figures
come from.

regards
stevef

2009/1/28 Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>:
>
> Larry Masinter wrote:
>>>
>>> Is HTML5 mark up spec http://shrinkster.com/13zy useful compared to
>>> the fullblown spec http://shrinkster.com/13zz use #html5ml in reply
>>
>> The survey is biased, because it is asking individuals without
>> context to compare the utility of an initial draft of a document,
>> against one document that has been under preparation for years,
>> and implies that only the former would be produced rather than
>> both.
>>
>> If you were going to do a survey, you might ask something like:
>>
>> "Would you like the opportunity to review the utility of a
>> having a mark up spec (initial draft http://shrinkster.com/13zy )
>> as a separate document from a fullblown specification such as
>>  http://shrinkster.com/13zz.
>
> Even that's not great, because it fails to mention the alternatives that
> exist explicitly for web developers  Namely, the authoring guides that DanC
> and I are working on.  It even fails to point out which specific sections of
> the spec are intended for them.  And if Mike's draft is going to be
> positioned as a document targeted at web developers, then it's important
> that the those being asked are aware of what else is available, rather than
> have it being presented as an either-or choice between just the two of them.
>
> Indeed, I'm sure there are a lot of web developers who find the full spec
> intimidating (probably to a large extent due to its size, rather than the
> way it's written), and in comparison with that alone may prefer a document
> that just dealt with the markup language, like Mike's draft.  But in this
> context, that's comparing apples and oranges, since the full spec is known
> to known not to be optimised for the average author.  Whereas the authoring
> guides are designed to be optimised for them
>
> In light of this, I resonded on WSG to give some background about the
> documents that are being produced.  Hopefully this will help us obtain more
> useful information.
>
> http://www.mail-archive.com/wsg@webstandardsgroup.org/msg38188.html
>
> --
> Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
> http://lachy.id.au/
> http://www.opera.com/
>
>



-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org
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Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 16:50:22 UTC