- From: <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2015 15:58:52 +0000
- To: public-qt-comments@w3.org
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=28015 Jim Melton <jim.melton@acm.org> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |jim.melton@acm.org --- Comment #10 from Jim Melton <jim.melton@acm.org> --- Patrick, I'm responding both as co-chair of the XML Query WG *and* as somebody who has been deeply involved in de jure standardization for three decades, as well as editor of an extremely large suite of standards (ISO/IEC 9075, Database Language SQL). I'm deeply sympathetic to the concern you've raised. As you implied, it's a common concern amongst many standards, probably most standards in the ICT field. However, as you well know, standardization is a delicate balancing act of tensions in multiple dimensions. One of those dimensions is, of course, cost vs benefit, to which you alluded in your initial comment. Another is the classic problem of "good, fast, and cheap -- pick two" (in this case, "good" represents quality of specification, "fast" represents the length of time to develop the specification, and "cheap" represents the cost of developing the spec). Yet a third is time-to-publication vs value-to-implementers -- a more valuable spec (in, for example, the terms you suggest in your initial comment) almost certainly guarantees a delay in publication. That delay is not necessarily reduceable by adding more resources (see "The Mythical Man-Month"), but a sufficiently long delay may well make the standard no longer timely, either because implementers have gone ahead and implemented *something* or because they've decided to go an entirely different direction. Because my full-time job for the last 30 years has been standardization, and particularly editing the SQL standard, I have had the luxury of paying incredible attention to details of the kind that seem to concern you. Almost nobody else on the planet involved in data management standards has that luxury, and our increasingly limited resources in the XML Query WG and XSLT WG do not include anybody whose full time job is QT standards. With both sympathy and respect for your view and your comments, I have to say that I do not believe that it is possible for us to head in the direction you'd like us to go (with respect to this bug, at least). If you were able to join the WG, we would happily accept the additional resources you might be able to offer to pursue this direction. Without that, we are simply unable to respond favorably at this point in the development of XQuery and its associated documents. Sorry! Jim -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the QA Contact for the bug.
Received on Tuesday, 17 March 2015 15:58:54 UTC