Re: [EXTERNAL] Review of Process 2020

> On Dec 4, 2019, at 4:35, Jeff Jaffe <jeff@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> On 12/3/2019 12:56 PM, Carine Bournez wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 03, 2019 at 05:10:21PM +0000, Michael Champion wrote:
>>> 
>>> <rant>
>>> How about ???Recommendation.???  You have to ask yourselves whether the distinction between ???Recommendation??? and ???Living/Extensible/Expandable/Elastic/whatever Recommendation??? will matter in the real world.  Who (outside the W3C process community) will understand or care about the distinction?  If they do care to some extent, do they care enough to invest the time wordsmithing/building consensus on how to describe the distinction and defining the different processes?
>> 
>> +1
>> As I said in my earlier email:
>> "I like the subsequent proposal to merge and only have 1 kind of REC,
>> because since the start of the development of the evercolored process
>> I've seen a risk of getting a "low-class REC" compared to the other."
> 
> Well there is a certain elegance to just calling everything a Recommendation.  Everything is first class!
> 
> To turn this question around - Florian and Fantasai - what would we lose if we called everything a REC?  What process features would be harder or impossible to describe if we don't distinguish a REC from an EREC?


Working Groups and other internal parties of W3C would lose no ability. This is just removing a constraint. So from that point of view, it is absolutely doable.

However, the goal of this distinction is not internal. It is to allow the outside world to distinguish between Recommendations as they have always been (fixed feature set, possibly gaining fixes to errata over time) and Recommendations that can gain new features, which is different what what W3C Recommendation has meant until now.

It seems useful to distinguish RECs that can accept new features (not just fixes) for two reasons:
    - We don't really want to cause a bunch of other standards bodies to have to reevaluate whether normatively referencing W3C Recommendations is acceptable for them, due to the fact that we have changed what they mean. (Note that the ability to fix bugs in RECs is in itself not a change. It's been painfully bureaucratic until now, but it has always been allowed.)
    - Some external standards group actually do want to be able to point to specs whose feature-set doesn't change, and if we deprive them of that, they'll link to dated publications instead the undated ones which are getting fixes.
    
Of course, we don't need this distinction in the Process in order not to add features to a REC: we can simply refrain from adding them. But this allows us to visibly and reliably promise to the world we will do so for certain documents.

I'm ok with dropping the distinction if we collectively acknowledge that this is what it would give us, and that we prefer simplification over this signaling ability. But I feel I've explained this a few times already, and keep getting asked "why do we need this", rather than being told "I understand, but I think it's not important".

—Florian

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2019 05:02:28 UTC