Ultimate gatekeeper for document-conformance decisions [was: Why I don't attend the weekly teleconference]

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, 2009-06-24 00:20 +0000:

> On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Shelley Powers wrote:
> I'm not gatekeeper. I'm just another editor. The chairs are the ones with 
> the authority to declare consensus, which decides what gets published. I 
> certainly have no power to reject another draft.
> 
> (The browser vendors are the ultimate gatekeepers, of course, in that they 
> get to decide what actually gets implemented. It's our role as editors to 
> make sure we do what they want, otherwise our documents are nothing but 
> rather dry science fiction.)

Browser vendors may collectively be the de facto ultimate
gatekeepers as far as implementation decisions about features of
the language that require rendering in browsers, or some other
kind of associated behavior in browsers -- but they're certainly
not the ultimate gatekeepers as far as decisions about document
conformance.

In particular, they're not gatekeepers at all as far as deciding
whether certain existing or proposed elements or attributes that
don't have any associated behavior in browsers should be part of
the language or not -- or whether they should be optional or
required, or how their semantics and contents/values are defined.

This working group is the direct owner for those kinds of decisions.

And as far as publication of any W3C standard related to those, if
there's any ultimate gatekeeper, it's the W3C Director.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 01:45:16 UTC