Re: Spec organizations and prioritization

On Thursday, 22 March 2012 at 12:23, Jeff Jaffe wrote:

> [adding Daniel Glazman]
>  
> On 3/22/2012 6:27 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> > On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:41:50 +0100, Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org (mailto:jeff@w3.org)> wrote:
> > > As a strawman, I would propose that to achieve your goal we need zero  
> > > changes to the W3C process. Rather we need changes to a practices  
> > > and culture, through a single characteristic - modularization.
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > To me it sounds like you are trying to actually create more process  
> > with respect to how specifications are designed.
>  
>  
>  
> I don't understand what more process you think I am creating. In  
> particular, my suggestion adds zero rules.

I agree with Anne here. You are assuming that modularisation solves the problem in the way CSS is doing it. It is also possible to "modularise" sections of a spec for stability (as the WHATWG  HTML spec does), without making separate specs. Some specs, like HTML5, make sense as a monolithic spec: breaking it up into lots of "modules" would just be "make work".

As a point of comparison: look at the interop in HTML5 feature sets and the size of the HTML5 spec relative to other "modules" and that might give you an indication of speed and progress… HTML5, for its size and scope, has move at a pretty amazing speed by anyone's measure (and retained extremely high quality).   
> > Enforcing more rules on limited resources is a sure way to make them  
> > go away. (Unless you lead by example and demonstrate the effectiveness,
>  
> I was suggesting that the CSS group was providing the example. Surely  
> you don't want me to create a new group just for the purpose of setting  
> an example.

I don't know if they are or not. Work in CSS still progresses at generally normal pace (standardisation takes around 5 years on average, no?). W3C actually has all that data (how long from it takes from FPWD to Rec… would be good to get proper stats about how long on average the process takes and compare across groups).

Received on Thursday, 22 March 2012 12:52:17 UTC