Re: WebIDL: how to address the various audiences and constraints?

I'd like to extend a big welcome to all our friends who didn't know  
about W3C Process, and didn't want to either!

On Sep 30, 2009, at 13:45 , Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On Sep 30, 2009, at 3:40 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> To the best of my knowledge you won't find anything in Process  
>> stating what maturity levels you can reference; it's a PubRules  
>> thing. PubRules says:
>>
>> - "In general, documents do not advance to Recommendation with  
>> normative references to W3C specifications that are not yet  
>> Recommendations."
>> - To transition to PR you should check that you're only referencing  
>> PR+ specifications.
>> - To transition to CR you should check that you're only referencing  
>> PR+ specifications.
>
> It's a requirement to reference only PR+ specifications to enter CR?  
> That doesn't sound right. It would make it very hard to ever get to  
> CR with a spec that has a significant dependency chain of new specs,  
> and would make mutual references completely impossible.

I'm well aware of that — don't shoot the messenger. It's documented  
here:

"Does this specification have any normative references to W3C  
specifications that are not yet Proposed Recommendations?"

   http://www.w3.org/2005/08/online_xslt/xslt?xmlfile=http://www.w3.org/2005/08/01-transitions.html&xslfile=http://www.w3.org/2005/08/transitions.xsl&docstatus=cr-tr

That's from the Transition Guide, pointed to as part of PubRules.

> I can find historical counter-examples:
>
> DOM 3 LS entered CR on Nov 7, 2003, and it referenced DOM 3 Core  
> which at the time was a WD and entered CR on the same day. Selectors  
> Level 3 entered CR in November 2001 (it later went back to WD) and  
> it cited multiple Working Drafts normatively.

I know, there are many more. I wouldn't be surprised if the Two Steps  
Behind rule (which I do find a bit lax to be honest) was something  
that was agreed to in a Director's Call for one given document and  
somehow percolated into tradition.

> We should probably seek input from the Team on the actual rules on  
> this.

Yup. Doug? Mike?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Wednesday, 30 September 2009 12:17:04 UTC