[Bug 28015] Vague references – $N versus 5000 x $N

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28015

--- Comment #9 from Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> ---
Patrick,

Most people when they raise bug reports use a title that summarizes the problem
they are raising. You chose, for some reason, to use a title that asserts
monetary value in fixing the problem. I don't know why you did that, but I
think it was a bad mistake, because it encourages us to think hard about costs
and benefits, and that is likely to have the opposite effect from the one
intended.

On a back-of-an-envelope calculation, I would estimate the investment in
creating this family of specifications as being somewhere in the order of $10m.
Some of this cost has been borne by large companies, some by start-ups; a lot
of it is actually free time given by volunteers who earned nothing for the
work. By contrast, our readers get free use of the material. Some of our
readers (companies like Intel and Altova) have built significant commercial
products using these specifications as design input, for which they have
contributed nothing. I'm not complaining: we know what we are doing. But many
members of the WG are struggling to justify travel costs or continuing
participation to their management: do you seriously think that the argument "we
need to spend more money so that our competitors can reduce their costs" is
going to carry much weight?

Our readers are getting a free lunch. You are telling us it would be a better
free lunch if we added caviar.

We also need to question your assumption that improving the rigour of the
specifications will increase their value. The most successful specification
produced by these working groups to date, measured by the number of people
using implementations of the spec, is (by a large margin) XPath 1.0. Yet XPath
1.0 is also (by a large margin) the least rigorous of the specifications. To
put it in perspective, the specification of the sum() function has increased
from 26 words in XPath 1.0 to about 320 words in XPath 3.1. There was a cost in
doing that, which one could attempt to measure. Can we start to measure the
value? Was it a good return on investment? Is there any evidence that XPath 3.1
implementations are cheaper to produce as a result? I very much doubt it.

I think all the evidence points the other way. Most of us, like you, are
obsessive perfectionists by nature, and we do this kind of "improvement" work
because it is in our character to do it. Anyone holding the purse-strings and
looking at the value of the work would tell us to stop now and ship the thing.

Sorry that this comment is totally unrelated to the true subject of your bug
report. But that's your fault, for choosing a title that was unrelated to the
subject.

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Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2015 08:31:42 UTC