Re: discretion in adding issues [was: respecification of document.write...]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 3:34 AM, Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com> wrote:

> I understand that issues places a burden on the WG. I wish the process went
> smoother so that edits to the draft occurred in some correspondence to the
> deliberations of the WG. Until that happens, I can't see another way to
> handle this then through the issue-tracker system.

Would you mind demonstrating an instance where the WG and issue
tracker were not in-sync? We should keep in mind that the issue
tracker is not a line-by-line "bug" tracker for the specification. It
is meant to track WG progress (often represented as ACTIONs) on broad
concepts concerning the specification. For instance we an issue to
help track the progress and discussion around @alt. In this cases
there is groundswell of WG discussion about a concept and the issue
tracker will help track how we our decision came to be.

> Having said all of that, although I usually cannot attend the
> teleconferences, I want to let you know (as  also conveyed to  Gregory,
> Laura and Joshue who often can attend teleconferences) that I am available
> to work on these issues: i.e., drafting spec language, coordinating research
> needs and facilitating discussion. I hope you understand too, that a great
> amount of work — by me and many other WG members — already has gone into
> discussing these topics and congealing them into actionable items from all
> of these lengthy prior discussions.

Either you or I have fundamentally misunderstood how issues are
developed in the WG... I'll leave such guidance to our Chairs.

There's not a ground swell of discussion about ["UA norm for redirects
(both META and http)"][1]. I'm not just saying this from memory... if
I do [a really simple search for "redirect" across public-html][2] I'd
don't see any discussion about your exact issue until you raised it.
That you took the time to document a potential issue and start a
thread about it is good... that you presumed "it will be added to the
issue-tracker in time" is inappropriate.

Here's an example from one that was made into an ISSUE: To say a great
amount of discussion went into [ISSUE-43][3] (Client-Side Image Maps)
is a very strong misrepresentation. There's almost no discussion of
them in the public-html records or on IRC. The [wiki page][4] cited in
this issue contains edits entirely from one author.

Please don't misunderstand me Robert - you have every right to start a
discussion and craft the discussion into an issue. No one is going to
discourage you from investing your energy into fostering healthy
discussions. If anyone does so you should ignore them and continue
building support, compiling use cases, finding research, and
documenting your efforts.

The problem (from my POV) with prematurely opening issues is that they
haven't been vetted ... and now it is left to a handful of issue
tracking volunteers, the editors, and the Chairs to sort this mess
out.

Shawn

[1]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/0727.html
[2]:
http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?type-index=public-html&index-type=t&keywords=redirect&search=Search
[3]: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/43
[4]: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ImageMapIssues

Received on Friday, 30 May 2008 16:40:34 UTC