Re: Why Design Principles?

One other point I forgot to add in my already way-too-long email:

9. == Why bother with the Design Principles at all? Don't we have  
better things to do? ==

To be honest, I was pretty happy with not touching the Design  
Principles until Sam asked me to address the outstanding Formal  
Objection (now done). The ensuing discussion brought up the idea that  
we should somehow cancel or abandon or park the Design Principles  
because there is still some disagreement, though not rising to the  
level of Formal Objection.

With the renewed interest in this document, I think it is important to  
continue for two reasons:

A) I think the Design Principles document is useful to the group as an  
aid to discussion. I also think it is useful as ancillary material  
that helps to explain the spec, much in the same way as the html4  
diffs document.

B) The actual level of dissent over the Design Principles is quite  
low. The number of objectors is rather small, the disagreements do not  
rise to the level of Formal Objections, and many are over form, not  
substance. As Henri points out[1], if this level of disagreement is  
enough to make us stop work, we will never get anything done. So at  
this point, I think it would be a very bad precedent to formally  
abandon the Design Principles. The level of dissent is lower than for  
HTML5, and the stakes are much lower as well. If we can't come to  
reasonable agreement here, then how will we ever resolve much harder  
issues?


Regards,
Maciej

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009May/0322.html

Received on Tuesday, 2 June 2009 03:30:51 UTC