Re: Request to halt the heartbeat publication of HTML5 WG Draft

-public-html
+www-archive, +Maciej

Taking this off-list because it's turning into a process discussion that 
doesn't belong on public-html.

On 2010-06-09 03:48, Sam Ruby wrote:
> To have the W3C specification refer readers to another specification for
> an exact list of differences, and to have that other specification
> indicate that the omission was due to political reasons is intolerable.

To have the HTMLWG degrade into nothing but a massive political debate, 
where decisions are made based on "proposals that create the weakest 
objections" — where you have demonstrated time and time again that that 
simply means the loudest group wins [1] — is intolerable.

The process is designed to let people endlessly drag issues through an 
insane level of bureaucracy just because, despite having every argument 
soundly refuted, some people won't give up and keep coming back for more 
(cf. ISSUE-4/84 (DOCTYPE), ISSUE-30 (longdesc), ISSUE-91/93/95-97 
(removing elements/attributes), etc.).

If you don't like being called out on having a purely political process 
in place, then you shouldn't have such a political process at all.  Let 
this group get back to making technically sound decisions based purely 
on the merits of the argument, and stop letting bureaucracy trolls 
dictate the direction that this group heads in.  I'm becomming 
increasingly frustrated with the way in which the HTMLWG is being run, 
and being overrun by bureaucracy and people who just want to play 
politics, rather than maintain rational technical discussions; and I am 
losing faith in its ability to maintain its relevance.

I would like to find a way to restore the ability of this group to 
function in less bureaucratic way, which would involve dropping the 
whole overly-time-consuming change-proposal/counter-proposal process and 
going back to a far more productive WHATWG-style, technical-discussion 
environment that, despite its critics, has repeatedly shown itself to 
not only function well, but to produce the most technically sound 
results without degrading into political debates, at least until the 
HTML WG gets involved and messes up its copy of the spec.  I just worry 
that this won't be done out of fear that it will upset those who are 
creating the problems in this group to begin with.

[1] This has been the case with Microdata, which was split out simply to 
appease the RDFa proponents with technically weak arguments about 
fairness and "creating a level playing field".  And it was the case here 
with the statement about image analysis heuristics, where you clearly 
just went with the most vocal group, rather than the most technically 
sound argument; or at the very least finding a compromise solution that 
involved rephrasing it to clarify the meaning, as I previously suggested.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/

Received on Thursday, 10 June 2010 11:54:26 UTC