RE: Uncheckout, DAV.VersionSpace link, and History

Your absolutely correct that these are preliminary proposals, that is
why I title them as "proposals" and not "text for the standard". They
are not meant to be bullet proof. The proposals have all been generated
from a list of open problems I compiled based on comments from the last
meeting and Jim's published list. I am not trying to provide the final
copy of a standard. I am trying to show a direction and to see if there
is buy off. For example, after Jim's letter, I see that people have
problems with the STRUCTURE method. So I need to flesh that out more in
preparation for the author's meeting. However, in general, people seem
perfectly happy with the new syntax for LINK and LOCK. Now I know where
to spend more of my time. This sort of "gut level" feedback is really
useful. It helps to create a better spec.

As for your humor, actually I found that part funny. The part I found
insulting was your statement, in reference to my proposals, that "It's
like they've not
really been thought through.". I have been working 7 days a week, 14
hours a day, for three weeks in order to make all this content
available. I will leave it to your imagination as to what it feels like
to then have the HTTP-WG Chair come along and label the whole thing as
not having been thought out. 

"If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you insult my proposals, am I not
hurt?" =)

		Yaron

PS If, indeed, they have not been well thought out, then we probably
have bigger problems. However, as yet, no one has managed to punch any
solid holes in them. Rather most people, having just first seen these
totally new proposals are not fully comfortable with them. This is to be
expected. I have spent weeks wrapping my mind around these ideas. It
would be unreasonable to expect people, seeing them for the first time
and in an abridged form, to instantly accept them. It would be like
trying to understand Shakespeare from the cliff notes. You get a
superficial understanding but the richness of the details is missing.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Larry Masinter [SMTP:masinter@parc.xerox.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, March 26, 1997 1:04 PM
> To:	Yaron Goland
> Cc:	w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject:	Re: Uncheckout, DAV.VersionSpace link, and History
> 
> Yaron, I'm just asking for a little consideration and context.
> 
> You were sending a lot of proposals to the mailing list. The issues
> of timing and interaction, robustness and transactions were not
> addressed or referenced in any of them. The problem statements
> made allusions to previous proposals without giving reference to
> them, and did not, in the "Problem Statement" section, identify
> what Distributed Authoring and Versioning problem they solved.
> 
> I'm happy to accept that these are just advanced notice of what
> you and others will be discussing at a private meeting next week,
> but it's useful to say that they'll need serious review against
> robustness criteria, and that the proposals, as written, don't
> indicate
> that the review had been done. It's OK that they're preliminary
> drafts. I hope it's OK that there's not really a lot of time to
> review them in depth, and that the analysis of the robustness
> of the proposals that I gave was pretty hurried.
> 
> I'm sorry that my attempt at humor ("Problem Description" /
> "Proposal")
> was taken as insulting. I just wanted to say "ouch", what you
> were doing hurt.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Larry
> --
> http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Wednesday, 26 March 1997 16:53:15 UTC