Re: Informative components of w3c specifications

On Friday, July 11, 2014 at 10:53 AM, Shane McCarron wrote:

> Marcos, I do *not* disagree with you, but your statement reminded me of one of my very early experiences in the standards world. I share it for your amusement, but it may also change your mind.
> 
> I was working on X3J11 (ANSI C) in about 1986?
Much respect.  
> In reviewing a draft, there was some language that was overly complex and honestly unclear. I'm a smart guy and a native English speaker, so I finally puzzled it out. But non-native speakers or people who can't readily parse a 100 word sentence might have trouble. I proposed a change to basically split up the sentence and remove some punctuation so there were fewer dependent clauses. 
> 
> A few months later, when the committee was done processing all of the change requests, the reply I got was along the lines of "Thank you for your comment. Your proposed change is rejected. A complete reading of the standard would render full understanding of this issue".
> 
> In other words, if I read the entire document, I would have known what that section meant. I didn't need to be reworded.
That's very sad to hear. The committee were either incompetent or lacked judgement when rejecting your change (specially if it helped clarify things). 

However, your change was still to normative text. And although I take your point about not needing to backtrack to know what is informative and what is normative, this still doesn't strengthen (in my mind, at least) the need to add "this is informative" explicitly on a note. 
> People don't read the entire document. Other documents link into our specs - to sections that have normative text and embedded notes. I am as lazy as the next guy. I am not going to scroll up to the conformance section to see whether notes are by default informative in the spec I am reading at the moment. I'm just not.

Personally, I'm still not convinced that this is an issue. Unlike other consortia, we have a strong culture of being very developer focused.

My gut reaction here is that I sometimes feel like we are trying to "fix" things preemptively without data to show there is actually a problem.

Received on Friday, 11 July 2014 15:57:58 UTC