[Fwd: [wbs] response to 'Call for Review: HTML 5.1 is W3C Proposed Recommendation']

Forwarding to www-archive so these comments are public, but without
spamming a bunch of lists that people actually subscribe to.

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)

attached mail follows:

The following answers have been successfully submitted to 'Call for Review:
HTML 5.1 is W3C Proposed Recommendation' (Advisory Committee) for Mozilla
Foundation by David Baron.

The reviewer abstained from the review of "HTML 5.1".


Additional comments about the specification:
   If the new option ("Does not support this ... for the reasons cited in
comments but is not raising a Formal Objection") described in
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-ac-members/2015OctDec/0014.html
were available for PR reviews in addition to charter reviews, I would have
used it here.


One editorial fix that would be good to see is a list of changes relative
to the HTML 5.0 recommendation, as requested in
https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/592 .  It sounds like that may be in
progress.

Our broader concerns are in two areas:

 (1) that some of the changes made in the development of this specification
were about reversing (relative to HTML 5.0) position on previously
controversial topics with only a small portion of the previous participants
in the room.  In other words, the group has spent a lot of energy
relitigating past fights, and less energy on major improvements to the Web.
 (However, it doesn't seem that the environment in the working group has
built a culture that attracts participants who want to do the latter.)

One example of this problem was the longdesc changes, which were reverted
in https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/507 .

Another example, still remaining, is the re-addition of the rev attribute,
as explained in
https://github.com/w3c/html/issues/256#issuecomment-253674835 .  It would
be good to see this addition reverted.


(2) There have been other higher-level problems with the operation of the
group, some of which were described in
https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film-at-11 .  One that remains
particularly bothersome is the conversion of the entire specification to a
different preprocessing system in a way that was not reviewable by others
(multiple months of work landing as a single commit in version control). 
This change introduced errors that I'm told are still being discovered, and
makes it harder for the W3C's copy of the specification to take changes
from the WHATWG's copy.  (The lack of public discussion prior to any of
these changes is also quite problematic.)


Given these issues, it remains the case that Mozilla engineers look towards
the WHATWG copy of the specification both for what to implement and for
where to work on developing new Web features that belong in the HTML
specification.


The reviewer's organization:
   - produces products addressed by this specification

Answers to this questionnaire can be set and changed at
https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/html51/ until 2016-10-13.

 Regards,

 The Automatic WBS Mailer