Re: "Living Standards"

On Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:59:05 +0100, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

> On Friday, February 3, 2012 at 2:54 PM, Robin Berjon wrote:
>
>> I think that this ties in with the issue that when you find yourself on  
>> a dated TR version, nothing tells you if it's the latest and greatest  
>> or not. Ideally, every W3C specification should be published with a  
>> small bit of JS that asks if it's the latest and very obviously flags  
>> itself as obsolete if it is not. That would work nicely for copied  
>> documents as well.
>
> Sure, but how do we solve the issue of people not reading the warning?

Same way we solve the issue of people who are implementing not reading the  
spec (or half reading it, or thinking that it is fine to do anything that  
a lawyer can argue convincingly is justified by a careful interpretation  
of the spec, without reference to whether it makes sense)...

We don't. We solve some of the issues that such people cause, by telling  
them afterwards that they have done the wrong thing, or by fixing all the  
other implementations and new versions of the spec to cope with whatever  
they broke, or we throw away a few million dollars worth of investment and  
do something else.

And we hope people *do* read stuff more often, because if they don't then  
there really isn't anything good we can do about it. That's life.

cheers

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Saturday, 4 February 2012 17:17:54 UTC