Re: HTML.next and Rechartering

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Charles McCathieNevile
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> Indeed. It might be that this group suggests to W3C at large that Last Call
> has sufficient problems that W3C should investigate de-coupling it from a
> crucial point of Patent Policy. Although that will take time, and the
> discussion is larger than the HTML WG.

More specifically, progression along the REC track currently has
mostly technical requirements but mostly legal implications.  This is
bad, because it means that technical decisions are being made on legal
(non-technical) grounds.  For legal purposes, we need to create
immutable snapshots of some type that the patent policy will apply to.
 But requiring two interoperable implementations of every feature in
the snapshot before the patent policy applies doesn't make sense.
Instead, the snapshots should just be taken of arbitrary Editor's
Drafts without technical review.  That serves the legal purposes just
as well -- if there are even gross technical errors, that doesn't
affect the utility to the patent policy.

If we also want some type of technical stabilization process for
whatever reason, then we could have that too.  But it shouldn't be
related to the patent policy.

Received on Monday, 12 September 2011 17:36:42 UTC