RE: New Requirements Draft

The requirements document is used to determine what are legitimate
topics for discussion within the working group. It does not exist to be
a shopping list of hopes and dreams.

Furthermore Martin, you make some very sweeping statements such as "And
variants are a significant component of every serious web site, and a
web authoring system that cannot deal with them, or a protocol for such
systems that cannot deal with them, isn't much more than a toy system."

Would you care to back this up with some facts? What is a "serious" web
site? Which of these "serious" web sites use variants? What percentage
of all web sites are "serious" and use variants? What commercial systems
deploy with built in support for variant handling? How many people use
those systems? Of the people using those systems, how many actually use
the variant features? How many web sites use variants as opposed to
having a "choose English here" tag? How many web sites that use variants
do so through their own custom code? How many web sites handle primarily
language variants by having an initial detection of the accept-language
tag and then redirect the person to an entire site in a single language?

			Yaron

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Martin J. Dürst [SMTP:mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch]
> Sent:	Wednesday, August 27, 1997 3:10 AM
> To:	Yaron Goland
> Cc:	'Judith Slein'; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
> Subject:	RE: New Requirements Draft
> 
> On Tue, 26 Aug 1997, Yaron Goland wrote:
> 
> > I strongly object to 5.11.2, with or without a warning that we can
> not
> > find a satisfactory solution.
> > 
> > There is consensus that we wish to be able to lock multiple
> resources
> > simultaneously, it just isn't clear if we can write up a
> satisfactory
> > standard to meet this requirement.
> > 
> > However there is not consensus on dealing with variants. Many folks,
> > myself included, believe that this is out of scope for the group and
> > should not be a goal.
> 
> I'm not happy with the title of 5.11.2, which reads "Language
> Variants".
> The text is okay, as it is general. Although I think language variants
> are very important, I do not think they can be dealt with in isolation
> from other variants. The title should be changed to "Variants", and
> laguage variants, together with other variants, should be mentionned
> in the text as examples.
> 
> As for the requirement in general, I think the title of this group
> is distributed authoring and *versioning*. Versions and variants
> are intimately related. And variants are a significant component of
> every serious web site, and a web authoring system that cannot
> deal with them, or a protocol for such systems that cannot deal
> with them, isn't much more than a toy system.
> 
> > > This document is intended to reflect the consensus of the WWW 
> > > Distributed Authoring and Versioning working group (WebDAV) as to
> the 
> > > functionality that needs to be standardized to support distributed
> 
> > > authoring and versioning on the Web.
> 
> Please note that this document only speaks about what we think is
> needed, not what we agree we want to work on. I know quite some
> people who seriously need support for variants. I guess those
> people who work on the Microsoft web sites would easily qualify
> (although I don't know them).
> 
> Regards,	Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 1997 13:58:16 UTC