Re: Request to Revert revision 1.4525

On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, Sam Ruby wrote:
>
> Ian, the chairs have determined that the following change is likely to 
> reduce rather than increase consensus, and therefore per our 
> agreement[1] are requesting a speedy revert of the following change 
> pending resolution of the "publishing problem":
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-commits/2010Oct/0332.html

Holy overreaction, batman. I'm just having some publication issues and 
didn't want people to be referencing an obsolete editor's draft in the 
meantime. It'll be fixed when it's fixed. I really don't think it's a good 
idea to have people referencing an obsolete draft in the meantime, though, 
especially since there's a perfectly adequate alternative available that 
I can point people to, so I've left it as-is for now. In the meantime I 
have some rather more important issues to deal with, such as fixing the 
bugs for which you specified a deadline.

It's just an editor's draft, you know. As editor I'm not actually required 
to provide one at all. I could just provide snapshots by e-mail, or host 
raw source on my personal Web site.


> And furthermore, we are asking that if you have a list of issues that 
> you feel need to be resolved, you enumerate them either on this list or 
> as bug reports.

Well since we're on the topic of obsolescence, I think we should have a 
warning on the TR/ page that this draft is perennially obsolete as well. 
It's causing lots of problems with people referencing old (and 
known-wrong, since-fixed) text [1]. I'd added such a warning to the draft 
before we last published but for some reason you removed it.

Furthermore, since you ask: There's plenty of other things I think should 
be resolved, for example all the problems with the issue process that I've 
raised in the past (and had dismissed), or the sheer number of absurd 
issues that you are letting reach the "poll" stage (What we should 
reference for ASCII? What the title of the AT annotations section should 
be? Really?), or the ludicrous situation of having three chairs instead of 
one (which means that anything involving the chairs ends up having to 
require a committee to make the decision, a situation seemingly taken 
straight out of the WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"), or the now 
perennial license issue, or the decisions that make no sense (q.v. 
Lachlan's analysis of the microdata decision [2]), or indeed the _months_ 
it takes for you to make these simple decisions despite you then 
hypocritically asking me to do things "in a timely fashion" after just one 
day of the editor's draft not being updated... but really, I have no 
illusion that any of these will be fixed, and I'd much rather spend my 
time worrying about what matters: improving interoperability on the Web.


[1] Most of the cases I'm aware of are in private communications with 
browser vendors (I often have people ask me questions privately), but a 
host of examples can also be found by searching list archives or your 
favourite search engine for references to the TR/html5 page. It's rather 
depressing how often people are running into things that we've already 
fixed, because they think the TR/ page is somehow useful. In practice, 
with openly-developed technologies like HTML, the TR/ page is actually a 
harmful anachronism that we really should do away with entirely. That's an 
issue for the W3C's staff, though, I don't suggest we try to fix it here.

[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2010Jun/0017.html

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

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2010 07:11:33 UTC