Formal Objection: publication of XForms 1.1 as LCWD

Dear Forms Working Group,

  Please report to The Director my formal objection to the Working
Group's decision to publish XForms 1.1 as Last Call Working Draft.
The group made this decision in violation of the W3C Process, and due
to its shocking history of W3C Process ignorance it would be difficult
to assert that the document has received wide review and, therefore,
advance the document under the rules of the W3C Process.

Since the Forms Working Group has no interest in following the W3C
Recommendation Track Process to develop XForms as demonstrated below,
it is unclear to me that XForms development should continue in form
of a W3C Working Group.

However, if that is to be so, I recommend that instead of advancing
XForms 1.1, the document is returned to the Working Group for further
work and the group does not request publication of it as LCWD until
after the group has, for all comments received since the publication
of XForms 1.0 as LCWD, either formally addressed the comment or pub-
lically documented sound rationale for not doing so, documented the
results of this process, published updated non-LC drafts taking the
results of this process into account, given reviewers sufficient time
to review it, and put the XForms 1.0 errata into a form that satisfies
the requirements of the W3C Process.

It is important to note that this is not asking anything at all, had
the Working Group not ignored the W3C Process for many years, this
would be a zero-effort process. Similarily, the concern is not that
a few things slipped through the cracks: the group has been repeatedly
reminded of its failure the follow the W3C Process, and took little to
no action to improve the situation. To give a few examples of my own
experience with the group:

Pre-REC comments on XForms 1.0 that I have never received a response to:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2003Aug/0002.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2003Aug/0003.html

An XForms 1.1 comment the group produced no meaningful response to:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2004Jan/0004.html

A reminder to address the comment above (more reminders further down):

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms-editor/2004Aug/0001.html

Discussions of the group's continued Process ignorance:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2004Oct/0014.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2004Nov/0050.html

A detailed review of how the group systematically ignored 1.0 comments:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/process-issues/2006Feb/0001.html

Reminders of the W3C Process requirements for errata maintenance:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2006Jun/0043.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-forms/2006Sep/0109.html

The group has not provided a response to any of these messages. As I
already concluded in 2004, any attempt to cooperate with the group is
a complete waste of effort. This view is shared, at least in part, by
several other people with first hand experience with the Forms WG I
talked to. As a consequence, many interested parties chose to not
review the XForms 1.1 draft at all, let alone provide comments on it.

Having received wide review is a pre-condition for advancement of the
document to Candidate Recommendation status, and without the group
following the the steps proposed above in full, it would be difficult
to get to a point where interested parties do not actively refuse to
review the document. Hence my recommendation.

Thanks,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Friday, 6 April 2007 05:54:02 UTC