- From: <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 08:31:39 +0000
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
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. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the QA Contact for the bug.
Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2015 08:31:42 UTC