Re: Encoding Standard

On Tue, 2013-10-08 at 15:44 +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> Replying to Richard's email as it copies everyone included thus far. I
> have read the other emails.
> 
> On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote:
> > I'd be grateful if you could sum up your thoughts clearly for us, if nothing
> > else so that the Working Group understands how to discuss this, and so that
> > we can clearly communicate with others wrt to the Encoding spec as a
> > chartered deliverable of the WG.
> 
> I agree with http://www.w3.org/2013/09/html-faq#shouldifork that
> forking a standard has a high cost.
>
> I consider publishing a copy of the text of the Encoding Standard
> http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/ on TR/ to be a fork as it is no
> longer under control of the originating group. The obvious parallel
> here is the HTML WG which publishes HTML5 which is quite clearly
> derived from the HTML Standard, but not the same.

This depends on the kind of fork. As always, there as pros and cons and
the goal here is to avoid fragmentation. For encoding, I understand that
the I18n working group has no interest in modifying the document and
fragment the Web. Their main motivation is to have and maintain a
snapshot of the encoding specification, for the sake of providing stable
references. As such, the cost of forking is low. I agree that the risk
isn't null but I believe it is a lot lower that the fragmentation cost
around HTML for example. The main reason being that there are various
differences between the WHATWG HTML and the W3C HTML, while I don't
think it is the case for Encoding.

> Given that the W3C now acknowledges forking as a high cost, it should
> stop doing it.

You read "not recommended" as "must not do it". We never said that. If
we wanted to say that, we would have kept the W3C document license
instead. "not recommended" needs to be read as "SHOULD NOT (see RFC
2119)", ie there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances
when the particular behavior is acceptable or even useful. W3C has
always granted permission to copy its specifications. The dual license
still allows you to do so. This use is actually not harmful to
interoperability and the cost is minimal. If you believe that this is
not well represented or understood in the HTML FAQ, I'm happy to clarify
it.

> That is my opinion. Given that the Encoding Standard is licensed under
> CC0 it can be forked. The reason we want that is to keep the standards
> body maintaining the standard honest. If you want to learn more about
> this I recommend reading this blog post:
> http://dbaron.org/log/20130522-w3c-licensing

We're coming closed to it, I believe the remaining misalignment is
around legal vs social obligations for attribution.

I don't think it's fair for an individual to work within a working group
on a specification, independently of where it originated or contributed
from, and then ask the Group to withdraw his or her contributions
afterwards. The document license was there at the beginning of the
charter, didn't change recently in the i18n wg, and the Group was
getting ready to publish it as a FPWD. It would be highly problematic if
organizations or individuals can withdraw simply contributions at any
time. I do realize that your position might cause some headaches in
terms of maintaining the snapshots over time however.

Philippe

Received on Tuesday, 8 October 2013 18:30:36 UTC