Re: CfC: publish WD of XHR; deadline November 29

On Wed, 5 Dec 2012, Glenn Adams wrote:
> 
> I believe, and I expect that the vast majority of the W3C membership 
> believes, that there should be a single canonical version of the HTML 
> related specifications, and that the W3C both owns and is responsible 
> for publishing them.

Then the W3C should write them.

I'm not objecting to the W3C doing work. The W3C does tons of work, and 
that's great. All I'm objecting to is *copying people's work* and 
republishing it without the cooperation of those people.

Also, "owns"? Seriously? This after the W3C said "HTML is dead"? Give me a 
break. The W3C has no more claim to ownership on anything than anyone else.

And in any case, all of what we're talking about is happening at the W3C, 
in a CG. It's a WG's behaviour of copying that work that's the issue here, 
not the organisational venue.


> It sounds like you are suggesting that there is another organization 
> that is capable of doing this that could and would be accepted by the 
> W3C Membership as well as other national and international standards 
> organizations and users.

I don't think it matters one iota if the W3C membership accepts something 
or not, nor if any national and international standards organisations 
accept something or not (especially given the history of those doing their 
own forking -- see ISO HTML, which by the way went nowhere).

I care about what users and authors think, but in practice they have to 
follow what the software does, or their pages don't work.

What matters is what implementors follow. I expect them that overall, they 
will follow whatever spec is most helpful (which means the most current 
one, which means the one being actually edited), but having multiple 
copies of the spec certainly confuses matters.

Again, all I'm objecting to is the wanton copying. It's not like we're 
lacking in actual work that needs doing. There's tons of specs that need 
editors. Why are we spending resources just to confuse matters? And then 
changing the references to give credit to these people who aren't doing 
anything useful? It's embarassing and shameful.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2012 22:34:51 UTC