Re: minutes: HTML WG Weekly 21 May 2009 [draft]

On Mon, 25 May 2009 10:05:59 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> On May 25, 2009, at 02:14, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>> I was in fact stating my personal opinion about what should happen to  
>> the document, which is that (in the apparent absence of clear consensus  
>> to continue, and at least some objection) we should park it as per W3C  
>> process for discontinued work - with the obvious implication that I  
>> think it should be discontinued.
>
>
> If we let the level of objection that the Design Principles got make us  
> abandon documents, we'll never get anything done.

Err, no. THe point of a consensus-driven process is getting things done,  
and figuring out how to do them so they work for everyone. That, after  
all, is the goal of the Web.

> As Maciej pointed out, the Design Principles review survey showed wide  
> support with very little dissent. (A small group of people disagreed on  
> many counts.) It's unlikely we could please the small group of  
> dissenters without watering down the Design Principles so that they'd be  
> less representative of the wider support.

You mean, it is unlikely that you could get a set of design principles  
that everyone supports?

I sort of agree. If you make the document rather more useless than it is  
already, people will probably recognise that and not support it.

> To be clear, I think the WG should not abandon the Design Principles  
> document, should not water down the principles themselves and should not  
> add front matter that undermines the content on the document.

Fair enough. And I think that
* recognising that the document doesn't represent a consensus of the  
group, but the agreement of a big chunk with what they read in it, plus  
the agreement of almost all the rest that publishing this in some form is  
a useful activity, and
* not spending more time trying to get such consensus since while this  
document is useful to inform our process, it isn't actually necessary

is the most appropriate way to spend the resources of the group. The  
logical process consequence of such a decision would be that the group  
should publish a version indicating the document is no longer an active  
work item.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Monday, 25 May 2009 09:37:21 UTC