- From: Charles McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru>
- Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 00:52:47 +1100
- To: "Arthur Barstow" <art.barstow@nokia.com>, public-w3process <public-w3process@w3.org>, "Sylvain Galineau" <galineau@adobe.com>
On Thu, 28 Nov 2013 03:34:00 +1100, Sylvain Galineau <galineau@adobe.com> wrote: > On 11/27/13 5:28 AM, "Arthur Barstow" <art.barstow@nokia.com> wrote: > >> Here are some general comments re the proposed Chapter 7 ... >> >> * The proposal includes useful editorial cleanup and simplifications but >> suffers from some organizational issues as captured in Issue-59. Yep. As noted in the response to that. >> * I like the elimination of Proposed Recommendation. [If AC reps are >> interested in a spec, they should be engaged much earlier in the process >> than PR. Additionally, PRs are mostly opaque to WG and require quite a >> bit of `make work` for Editors.] Glad to have got something right. >> * In practice, I don't think the elimination of LC or combining LC and >> CR [depending on how one spins the gist of the proposal] >> provides a significant improvement, I think of what we have done as: move some of Last Call (in particular the Patent Review required to decide whether a member wants to make a Patent Exclusion) to CR; and push Working Groups to get general review from the public done closer to when parts of a spec are "stabilised" - or changes are made - rather than waiting until there are preliminary implementations that have been around for a year or two which increase the cost associated with even changes that we would like to make. >> and as I stated last June, it appears to just create a bunch of new >> issues. F.ex. it appears a new process will be needed re "what is Wide >> Review, how are Reviews done, who is responsible for doing what" (which, >> IMHO is precisely the point of LC as defined in Process-20051022). I don't think this is a new issue. There is a requirement at CR to show wide review, and what we have done in the current draft is give some clearer guidance than the document did about what the Director will consider in evaluating whether that requirement has been met. > I've rarely seen a LC produce wide review, or what I think of as a 'wide > review'. 4-6 weeks may be enough to achieve wide-enough review within the > folks involved in W3C activities on a daily basis. For the wider > community of web experts and interested parties this is just far too > short. Indeed. >> * As far as I can tell, the gist of the LC+CR proposal can be achieved >> within the context of Process-20051022. Sure. In fact, if the group has used the existing process effectively to do so, Publishing a pre-LC and then an LC (as many groups currently do) is just another bit of busywork, which will lead to almost no comments and almost no significant changes. The Longdesc Extension, and Custom Elements, are two specifications whose Last Call seems to have required bureacratic work that slows down the work for no apparent benefit. >> The underlying issue the proposal appears to try to address is "how to >> prevent a spec from entering the dreaded LC->CR->LC->CR->... cycle". Yep. For Working Groups, the benefit is skipping a Last Call that is unnecessary. For the Public, the benefit is seeing a clearer sense of progress (or at least spinning at a higher lever) if a spec is really not going backwards in any meaningful sense. >> Of course the proposal doesn't eliminate the cycle problem (a spec can >> still have a LCCR->LCCR->... cycle), it just appears to "shift" the >> problem. > > To some extent, yes, the new CR/LCCR is now preceded by an implicit and > undefined Review stage that somehow makes it far more likely the former > will 'stick'. Exactly. > So one could argue we didn't eliminate LC as much as renamed it 'wide > review' and left its implementation up to WGs? To a large extent. There is a change of focus regarding "heartbeat" drafts (Revised Working Drafts), from 'every X months' to 'when there have been significant changes to the document that would benefit from review from beyond the Working Group' (the current text). This is intended to facilitate earlier review, based on what bits need review at any given time, without trying to define a requirement in formal terms. While the earlier review is important IMHO, I don't think trying to define a formal requirement would bring enough extra benefit to be worth the constraints it would impose. So yes, we ultimately leave implementation to the Working Group. cheers Chaals -- Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex chaals@yandex-team.ru Find more at http://yandex.com
Received on Thursday, 28 November 2013 13:53:23 UTC