Re: Publishing From-Origin Proposal as FPWD

* Marcos Caceres wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 5:50 PM, Hill, Brad <bhill@paypal-inc.com> wrote:
>> I feel that the goals of this draft are either inconsistent with the
>> basic architecture of the web, cannot be meaningfully accomplished
>> by the proposed mechanism, or both, and I haven't seen any discussion
>> of these concerns yet.

I note that the Web Applications Working Group's Charter, if Brad Hill
is a member, does require the rest of the Working Group to duly consider
his points before moving on without consensus. If not, then the group is
not required to wait with publication, but not discussing the points in
a timely manner, without an argument how publication is urgent in some
way, does not inspire confidence that the arguments will be heard and
duly handled.

>Publication will enable wider discussion - particularly wrt the issues
>you have raised. Not publishing it is tantamount to saying "I OBJECT
>TO PROGRESS!". If you are correct, more people will see it and the
>proposal will be shot down. Otherwise, other opinions will flourish
>that may sway your position (or a new perspective will emerge all
>together). In any case, calling for a spec not to be published, no
>matter how bad it is, is not the right way to do this. Publishing a
>spec is just a formality which can lead to discussion.

The more invested people are into something, the less likely they are
to cut their losses; by doing things, you frame the discussion in favour
of doing more. You get people to think more about how something can be
fixed rather than thinking about whether to abandon the work, or use a
very different approach. If you just propose an idea to me, we can talk
about it more freely than if you had already invested a lot of effort
on implementing the idea and asked me to review the idea after the fact.

(~ "Die normative Kraft des Faktischen")

Realizing something is a bad idea early is therefore very important and
not objecting to progress. Not wasting time on bad ideas is certainly
progress, even if only indirectly as you'd work on other things instead.
As such it is quite important to react timely to design critique with
care and detail. Psychologically, if you press ahead, you communicate
that you care more about moving on than discussing details, which is
likely to turn away the people more interested in details and quality;
and the same is of course true for draft of genuinely bad quality.

Which is just to say this is actually an important matter; sometimes it
is best to go ahead and put your ideas into practise whatever others may
be saying, other times it turns out that you should have listened more.
That is why we allow people to block actions, not necessarily progress,
but only up to the point where arguments have been duly considered. And
here we have yet to do that. Until that happens, short of someone making
the case for urgency, I would agree the group should not publish and
talk about this instead.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2011 23:38:11 UTC