Re: First Draft of W3C version of URL Spec

On 01/09/2014 18:00, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> Just because you can stab someone with a kitchen knife in the face doesn't mean you should. 
> 
> C0 allows many things, and some of those actions are considered disrespectful, harmful, or just plain unhelpful. It's common decency that if someone shows you that forking is actually doing more harm than good then, out of respect, you stop doing that. 
> 
> I'll again like to point to XHTML2. Back then, it was necessary to fork HTML because the W3C was doing it wrong. This mistake was acknowledged both by the W3C, by shutting down that work, and by the Director in a blog post. Forking HTML by the WHATWG turned out to be a really good thing: it gave the Web Community, for the first time, a specification that actually describes the core of the platform. 
> 
> In contrast, forking the DOM, Encoding, XHR, etc. specs is harmful because:
> 
> 1. the W3C is not adding any technical value: it's literally just copy/pasting. And it's even doing a terrible job at that simple task.  
> 2. the W3C process is incompatible with the living standards model (hence those specs won't ever go to REC without becoming quickly obsolete). This is *by design*. 
> 3. The reasons I stated at the start of this email thread.

Marcos, as I said earlier, I am not interested in answers to "why"
questions. The WHATWG specs mention explicit copyright and licensing
terms that WHATWG is visibly not willing to let W3C benefit from,
whatever the reason (I really do not care), good or bad. "Disrespect"
and "harmful" are not useful words in the world of copyright and
licenses. I think I highlighted an important issue between these
copyright/licensing terms and the expected interpretation of these
terms so I'm asking how WHATWG is going to fix this issue. Three
possibilities:

1. the legal terms do apply and you're adding an extra unwritten
   constraint excluding W3C from these legal terms. You will need to
   have it written down. In my opinion, this will give a very negative
   image of WHATWG.

2. the legal terms do apply, including to W3C, end of the story.

3. the issue above is a showstopper for you guys and the legal
   terms should be changed so quotes are allowed but forking by other
   standard bodies is not, something that seems completely contrary to
   the spirit of total openness of WHATWG and the countless requests to
   be able to fork W3C specs.

</Daniel>

Received on Monday, 1 September 2014 16:28:36 UTC