Re: Encoding Standard

Hello Anne,

Many thanks for your message. I'm sorry, but purely from a personal 
viewpoint, I have difficulties understanding your reasoning.

Are you saying that when W3C didn't allow forking at all, you were okay 
with the I18N WG publishing a parallel version of your encoding spec, 
but now that the W3C (in some cases) allows forking, you are no longer okay?

In my understanding, as long as W3C didn't allow forking, it's (implicit 
but quite obvious) position was that forking was something that must not 
happen. One simple way to express that is "prohibitively high costs, not 
allowed".

Now the W3C has changed that position slightly, with the actual license 
change and an explanation in the FAQ, reading essentially "high costs, 
not recommended."

In summary, your position to me reads like "When W3C was totally against 
forking, I was okay with it, but now that W3C may tolerate it in some 
cases, I'm not longer okay with it."

It just doesn't make sense to me. But maybe I'm missing something, and 
you can explain.

Regards,   Martin.

P.S.: Please note that although the W3C hasn't allowed forking in the 
past, there is at least one case where it allowed parallel publication: 
The Japanese translation of the XML Rec was published as the Japanese 
Industrial Standard JIS X 4159:2005.

On 2013/10/08 22:44, 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.
>
> Given that the W3C now acknowledges forking as a high cost, it should
> stop doing 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
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2013 08:16:19 UTC