Re: "Living Standards"

On Monday 2012-01-02 18:18 +0100, Robin Berjon wrote:
> Having said that, it doesn't really matter if that anchor is
> "Edition 17" or "Commit deadbeef". The important thing is to put
> people in control of whether they want the bleeding edge or a
> sta(b)le version.

I sort of agree, though I think in some cases there's a need for
minor maintenance on a stable version, much like the way software is
released:  there's a trunk of continuous development, and then
stable release branches that gradually restrict the type and scope
of changes to produce a more stable result.

To me, the most important aspect of living standards is that we
agree not to abandon the trunk of development (whether it's
abandoned to do a complete rewrite or just completely abandoned),
something that's been quite common in W3C (e.g., HTML 4.01 from 1998
to 2006, CSS2 from 1999 to 2002, DOM from 2001 to 2006).  This means
there's a forum for implementors and users to raise issues and get
the specification fixed.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂

Received on Monday, 2 January 2012 18:38:40 UTC