Re: what is appropriate to post to post to the WHATWG list?

On Tue, 20 Nov 2012, Steve Faulkner wrote:
> 
> So I can better understand what you consider appropriate to post to the 
> WHATWG list and what may be a cause for complaint from other list 
> members, of the following emails I posted on the topic of the main 
> element this month, which are not acceptable:

Any one alone is probably fine, it's just the volume that you are sending 
on what to many people on the list is really uninteresting that is causing 
them to complain.

(Just so we're clear, it wasn't a lot of complaints. If it had been, I 
would have been much more proactive about killing the relevant threads.)

On Tue, 20 Nov 2012, Steve Faulkner wrote:
> 
> In particular is it OK to post to the WHATWG list, asking for and 
> responding to feedback on a non WHATWG spec:

It's not forbidden, but it's probably more appropriate to post to the list 
for the spec than the WHATWG list. (e.g. XMLHttpRequest, Selectors, HTML 
Editing APIs, and DOM have all received feedback on the WHATWG list, even 
while not being WHATWG specs.)

What's not appropriate for the WHATWG list is repeating material that has 
already been posted, posting opinions without data or logical arguments 
("I won't implement this", or "this would be hard to implement", or "I 
would prefer to implement this", when sent by user agent implementors, 
count as data, since they affect what gets implemented and thus whether 
the spec is useful), e-mails that just say things like "me too" or "+1", 
and the like.

Basically, if it won't lead to the editor of a WHATWG spec considering 
changing a spec, then it doesn't belong on the list.

In the case of <main>, the arguments for and against have been made in 
detail (and indeed, were made in detail back in 2005), the situation has 
been considered carefully multiple times, and unless there's new data to 
be considered, posting more about it just increases the noise side of the 
signal to noise ratio.

Having said that, as far as <main> goes, despite it being a bad idea, 
there does seem to be some support for it amongst implementors. So your 
best move, if you think it's a good idea, would be to convince them to 
implement it. That would be new data which would almost immediately cause 
the spec to have it added, regardless of how good an idea it is.

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

Received on Friday, 23 November 2012 08:01:33 UTC