Priority of Constituencies proposal

I was discussing with some Social Web developers why this group was as
contentious, and it occured to me that one obvious problem is that we
don't have a clear priority of constituencies. This "Priority of
Constituencies" served HTML5 Working Group well, and I'd suggest we
adopt it with one change that acknowlegdges that we do have three very
different communities in the room trying to make a common
interoperability format, each with different design preferences (i.e.
JSON, microformats, and RDF).

Here's the version from HTML [1]:
"In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over
specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties
to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors; which in
turn should be given more weight than costs to implementors; which
should be given more weight than costs to authors of the spec itself,
which should be given more weight than those proposing changes for
theoretical reasons alone. Of course, it is preferred to make things
better for multiple constituencies at once."

It's rather common-sense but its important to be explicit about it.

Now, I'd like to take an amendment. There's three groups, each of which
have different definitions of theoretical purity: The JSON-using group
who are not terribly attached to JSON-LD and the details of AS2.0 but
are interested in a simple JSON format and has a number of implementers
with a larger number of end-users than the microformat space, a
micro-format community that prefers shipping around HTML with
microformats and has very active implementers, and another group around
RDF/Linked Data that has at least one active codebase.

I suggest that we prioritize the demands for theoretical purity based on
number of users/authors. Thus, we prioritize keeping JSON (ideally, as
simple as possible) over microformats, and we prioritize microformats
over RDF. My logic is the community that passes around JSON using HTTP
URIs is magnitudes larger than the microformat community, and the
microformat community is rather about equal in size to the RDF community
- although the microformat community is more active in terms of number
of implementers. However, I firmly believe the RDF community has
valuable insights that need to be input into the space around the use of
URLs and multiple schemas, and so the final specs should be acceptable
to all communities. Yet if microformat or RDF-specific processing is
required, that 'pain' should lie on the implementers who want to convert
the format to RDF or to microformats, and not on the users, authors, and
JSON-based implementers [roughly in that order].

I hope that makes sense and I think all communities will have to give
and take, but that's what consensus is about.

  cheers,
       harry


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies/

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2015 01:28:38 UTC