Re: Jason's comments Re: [XAG] New draft Announcement

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002, William Loughborough wrote:

>At 09:12 AM 9/25/2002 -0400, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>>We hope and I believe that this process makes the document a robust and
>>useful specification
>
>I guess there's no formal category called "specification"? The decision to
>go for "recommendation" status was already deliberated in the PFWG and when
>"voted on", carried.

Yes, the current policy is to try and make it a Recomendation. That isn't
cast in stone though.

>
>Clearly the current document may "specify" things such as "export
>semantics" which aren't all that easy to elucidate (I know what it means
>but can't convincingly explain how to either do it or check that it's been
>done) but which need to be called for.

If we are going to produce a Recommmendation we need to clarify how to do
just that. But I don't believe it is impossible, and personally think it is
worthwhile.

>The formal/testable "recommendation" will be in the works forever and will
>likely never be finaliz(s)ed - so be it.

I disagree about the likelihood, and think the value of a W3C Recommendation
is much higher than "some useful notes", both because it has higher status,
and because to get that it has to go through a rigorous process of review
that should ensure the document is implementable, testable, and useful.

>What we CAN do is to provide guidance even though they are unlikely to
>become "guidelines/checkpoints" and maybe if we just changed the
>designations thereto it would be helpful to the X community?

I think that any draft of XAG can be taken in that vein already. I think the
tougher process of preparing a Recommendation is an important way to focus us
on really getting it right.

cheers

Chaals

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 2002 12:47:42 UTC