- From: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 20:43:46 +0200
- To: public-w3process@w3.org
On 03/10/2014 19:25, Ian Hickson wrote: > Well, it turns out that in the years of asking people why they want stale > snapshots of specs, only two reasons that make any remote sense have ever > been presented to me [1]: > > 1. Patent lawyers, for litigation purposes, need to be able to reference > specific text, so that courts can make judgements; court cases tend to > last years, over which a standard may well evolve dramatically or even > become obsolete, but the court system, run by government officials, only > wants to make judgements for the precise time for which the case applies. > > 2. Governments frequently write contracts that need to refer specific > versions, for political reasons. These contracts are effectively > meaningless (it's not like all the people writing contracts that said > "must write a compliant HTML4 site" ever meant it; they wanted people to > write modern HTML that violates all kinds of HTML4 rules, like they wanted > people to assume media="" defaulted to "all" not to "screen" as per HTML4, > or they wanted people to use modern features like <video>), but, these > being governments, there's no way to negotiate sanity into the contracts, > they just have to be that way and are their specifics then ignored with a > nudge-nudge wink-wink approach. I gave you, face-to-face, a third example: large companies having to control the deployment of browsers internally because their operations rely on critical intranet web sites. I gave you this example in Santa Clara during a TPAC a few years ago. Such companies - and being the former AC-Rep of such a company, I faced the issue myself - cannot let the browsers self-update w/o validation. They would like to know exactly what is implemented and based on what spec's level. But when a browser vendor says "X is implemented", it doesn't refer to a given commit, it refers to a spec. If the spec is a living standard, there could be changes between the state of the implementation and the relevant prose in the living spec. This is hard to deal with, I think we can acknowledge that. Last time, I discussed this issue with a broader audience, I heard someone (not WHATWG nor W3C) call such companies, I quote, « dinosaurs of the past » and say these companies have no other choice but updating their browsers faster and more often. Which is impossible. I don't want to discuss if and why their requirements exist. They do exist, it's a fact. We have W3C Members in this situation for example. I find this issue much more important than "lawyers and governments" but I admit I could be biased because of my professionnal past. > Now in theory both of these could be resolved by pointing to repository > versions -- for example, the HTML spec has been through over 8800 > different versions each of which could be individually referenced -- but > patent lawyers and government officials both work in environments where > that would, for some reason, be unacceptable. In theory, the problem above would be solved if browser vendors could say "our version X implements feature Y retrieved from commit ZZZZZ" and if commit ZZZZZ was VERY easily reachable for people not used to our versioning systems. I see this as a workable compromise: no need to have snapshots, commits are snapshots, and your specs can remain living standards. </Daniel>
Received on Saturday, 4 October 2014 18:44:11 UTC