Trimming the Rec Track Process?

Hi,

I have been working on an idea about the Rec Track Process. I'm not the  
only one.

Roughly, I think it makes sense to collapse Candidate Recommendation and  
Last Call together. Having put this idea about, and listened to some  
responses and ideas about it I am becoming more convinced, so I sat down  
to rewrite the chapter in the Process that describes Rec Track as an  
exercise in seeing how this would pan out.

It seems to work out OK. Basically to get into last call you need to have  
done your job in the working group, and should have done a reasonable  
amount of coordination with the people most likely to care.

I clarify that the requirement for CR isn't "two implementations", it is  
"this spec will lead to independent implementations being highly  
interoperable". Two or more implementations has been used as if it were a  
proof by induction - the first people got the spec right, the next people  
got the spec right and work with the first lot, so the rest will too. But  
this is a pretty hand-wavy approach, which at the same time can be used to  
impose massive formalism on stuff that doesn't need it. (There are  
probably ways to make test cases for the p element that show it doesn't  
work entirely interoperably. That should be fixed, but the idea that we  
should rescind the element until it is fixed is just a bit ludicrous).

As a sideline, I kind of "trimmed" Proposed Recommendation a bit - it  
isn't so much a status as a waypoint. The assumption is that Proposed  
Recommendations become Recommendations, but there are examples of that not  
happening, and for the ones I know I think with good reason. So there is  
still a chance for the AC to say "no, stop, wait!!!", just in case.

And I re-cast the chapter so it focuses on who must/may/should not… do  
what.

In all of that, one nice side effect is getting the size of the chapter  
down by about 50%.

I haven't finished, but I am interested to hear people's thoughts on the  
idea.

I've tossed an early draft of this to the AB, so they can consider it in  
time to present it to the W3C members at the June AC meeting if they  
choose to do so. Some time in the next couple of days I expect to have a  
bit cleaner document that I don't mind being found in archives, with clear  
disclaimers to reduce excuses for confusion, plus fewer dodgy links, and  
making sure I don't breach a license somewhere. At that point I'll happily  
make it generally available...

If you want to see where I am up to in the meantime I'll happily email you  
a copy.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Monday, 13 May 2013 00:35:04 UTC