Re: the MathML comments

On Nov 8, 2009, at 11:25 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:

> Hi Shelley,
>
>> I think I missed the supportive IRC comments. Too bad, I would have
>> liked to see these.
>
> Sorry, that was a typo. It should have read unsupportive IRC comments.

I don't know if anyone else made explicitly unsupportive comments on  
IRC. But I'll note that my face-to-face comments (which were minuted  
on IRC and cited earlier) were not meant to be unsupportive, but  
rather purely fact-based. The IRC minutes do not fully reflect a  
number of things:

A) The degree of confusion over who sent what comments and what  
standing they had. There was a MathML WG member present and he  
expected HTML WG members present to be able to explain and defend the  
comments. Specifically the point of discussion was xlink:href vs. href  
attributes.

B) The fact that, after continuing confusion over the standing of the  
comments, everyone turned to me as the only co-chair in the room and  
asked me to explain what was going on. During the prior discussion,  
I'd searched the list archives and found that there were comments  
circulated for discussion Wednesday afternoon, and officially  
submitted Friday morning (with the MathML session occurring Friday  
afternoon); I also did not see a call for consensus. So I reported the  
facts as I saw them.

C) That I said any confusion was the fault of the chairs, for not  
giving a well-defined procedure for submitting collected comments.

D) That I clearly said Shelley duly volunteered to gather feedback.

If anyone is still concerned with what was minuted, I ask you to  
please check with someone who was present in the room at the time,  
instead of reading ill intent into the somewhat fragmentary minutes.


My conclusions after this experience are:

1) Having volunteers designated to collect comments for cross-WG  
review is extremely valuable - we would not have given as much review  
on MathML 3.0 if there hadn't been a specific person driving it.

2) To avoid confusion, it's probably best to explicitly mark such  
comments as being from individuals and collected by the WG, but not  
necessarily representing WG consensus, as suggested by Sam. The Chairs  
fell down on the job in not providing the right guidance up front.

3) It's also possible to have a call for consensus on cross-WG  
comments. But I agree with Sam that it's more considerate to send  
collected comments from individuals, because then the receiving WG  
knows who to talk to if they disagree. Indeed, I'd suggest that future  
cross-WG comments should name the individuals who provided them.

4) If you see something in the minutes that you're unhappy with, it  
may be a good idea to directly ask the speaker or someone who was  
present in person to explain. The minutes do not record every word  
that was spoken and often lack context.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Monday, 9 November 2009 02:21:04 UTC