Proposal: Approval on a section by section basis of a draft

It seems that part of the problem with the w3 process is that there is a 
problem publishing a document that contains some sections that are 
widely approved, while other sections are disputed.

While one solution to this is to slice up the document into modules (and 
this is a somewhat effective idea, for example with the CSS working 
group, different modules have been allowed to move at different paces, 
allowing generally approved subsets to move forward), the knowledge of 
which sections will become disputed only really occurs during the 
drafting process (I think this issue has arisen with some CSS3 module 
drafts already).

So this is my proposal, what if you could approve sections out of a 
document - ie, in the HTML5 draft on the TR page, sections where there 
is consensus would be updated to the editor's draft and other sections 
would not. In this situation it would be useful to mark what was the 
last update on each section in addition to the document as a whole. 
There could also be a formal process to force the splitting of section 
publishing for sections that are not related to each other. For example, 
if a dispute on section A lasts X many days, the review process for all 
other sections will be automatically separated from section A (except 
for any other sections that depend on section A).

Another way to approach this same idea is that if there is a dispute on 
a section of a draft, that draft should automatically split into 
separate documents, with the consensus parts moving forward.

The idea here is that disputes over "longdesc" should not prevent 
updates on the parser algorithm.

Now this isn't a formal proposal and I'm not a member of the W3C - but I 
care about the web and web standards and having observed disputes on 
these mailing lists, I thought I might throw out an idea to the 
participants here and see if anyone thinks it's a good idea and wants to 
run with it.

Received on Saturday, 24 March 2012 17:37:47 UTC