Re: formal objection to one vendor/one vote

On Sat, 11 Jul 2009, Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> Ian also took the opportunity to provide some insight[4] into his 
> decision making process.  In doing so, he created an impression that he 
> did so as Apple exercised a unilateral veto.  I believe that such an 
> impression is unfortunate, counter-productive, and not in line with my 
> understanding of either W3C or WHATWG processes. In particular, I 
> actually believe that the accepted goal of the WHATWG was two complete 
> and bug-free implementations in 2022.  I do not believe that Apple's 
> participation is required to meet that goal.  In particular, I believe 
> that there are at least three implementations today which could form the 
> basis for meeting that goal, with required codecs, namely the browsers 
> produced by Mozilla, Google, and Opera.  Nor do I believe that Ian has 
> talked to anybody who can say with absolute certainty what Apple will or 
> will not support by 2022, as I don't believe that such a person exists.

It's true that we could decide Safari is a lost cause and that the
spec won't describe what Safari does. When Mozilla says they won't
implement some other feature that has majority agreement, then we'd
also call them a lost cause, because it would be unfair to give
Mozilla veto power when we didn't give it to Apple. And then we would
have to decide that Chrome should be a lost cause when they decide
that they can disagree with features in the spec without repercussions
since everyone else is doing it, and then when Microsoft say they're
not going to implement the parser section, we'll still be fine,
because Opera would still be implementing everything, and after all we
only need two implementations to pass to REC, and I'm sure we could
find another... Lynx, maybe?

Of course by this point the spec would have no relationship to reality
whatsoever, but that's fine, because the goal is to go to REC, not
match reality, right?

Sarcasm aside, when I say that implementors have a veto, I'm not
saying this is part of the W3C or WHATWG process. It's not. The
processes don't claim that anyone has a veto, because claiming that
would be politically inconvenient, as is clear from recent
discussions. But that's academic.  They have the veto whether we like
it or not. It's not granted to them by the standards organisations;
it's not that I want to give them power over the spec; it's just that
as a simple matter of practicality, the implementors decide whether or
not they implement the spec, and if they don't, then the spec is
wrong. This isn't just browser vendors -- conformance checker
implementors have the ultimate word on what is conforming, ATs have
the ultimate word on what bolt-on accessibility features work (witness
HTML4 and axis="" or scope=""), editors have the ultimate word on
editor-related conformance requirements (e.g. our "SHOULD default to
UTF-8").

There's two costs to ignoring implementors - one is that it takes the
spec further from reality, and the other is that it loses the respect
of the implementors, which can in turn mean they go even further from
the spec. An extreme example of the latter is XHTML2. The working
group didn't take into account that implementors would have to
implement their work, and so the browser vendors ignored it.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 11 July 2009 23:38:39 UTC