Re: CfC: FPWD of Web Messaging; deadline November 13

On Sat, 6 Nov 2010, Arthur Barstow wrote:
>
> Ian, All - during WebApps' November 1 gathering, participants expressed 
> in an interest in publishing a First Public Working Draft of Web 
> Messaging [1] and this is a CfC to do so:
> 
>   http://dev.w3.org/html5/postmsg/
> 
> This CfC satisfies the group's requirement to "record the group's 
> decision to request advancement".

I'd rather not add another document to the list of documents for which I 
have to maintain separate W3C headers and footers at this time (especially 
given that I'm behind on taking the other drafts I'm editing to LC). The 
text in the spec really belongs in the HTML spec anyway and is already 
published by the WHATWG in the HTML spec there, and is already getting 
ample review and maintenance there, so I don't think it's especially 
pressing to publish it as a separate doc on the TR/ page. (The contents of 
the doc have already gone through FPWD at the W3C, so there's not even a 
patent policy reason to do it.)

I'm also a bit concerned that every time we publish anything on the TR/ 
page, we end up littering the Web with obsolete drafts (since the specs 
are maintained much faster than we publish them). I'd really rather just 
move away from publishing drafts on the TR/ page at all, if we could 
update the patent policy accordingly. I frequently get questions in 
private e-mails from implementors who are looking at obsolete drafts on 
the TR/ page about issues that have long been solved in the up to date 
drafts on dev.w3.org or at the WHATWG.

If there wasn't such high overhead to publishing on the TR/ page, an 
alternative would be to publish a new draft there frequently. In fact, the 
best thing on the short term might be to publish a new REC-level draft 
there every week or every month or some such (probably the best interval 
would be whatever the patent policy's exclusion window is), since that 
would actually make the patent policy work again. (Currently the patent 
policy at the W3C is almost as useless as at the IETF since when we follow 
the process properly, we almost never get to REC.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 6 November 2010 22:04:46 UTC