- From: John Boyer <boyerj@ca.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:30:35 -0700
- To: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Cc: www-forms@w3.org
- Message-ID: <OF2A7BE80E.B762BFA8-ON882572BA.0064CE4A-882572BA.0065AE95@ca.ibm.com>
Hi Bjoern, My apologies for resending this email to you. However, it appears that your email to www-forms-editor has also appeared in the www-forms public mailing list. I don't know how that happened since the email was only addressed to www-forms-editor. May I ask if you bcc'd it? If so, may I ask that you use cc in the future so that the public list can see not only your feedback but also that it has received a timely and thorough response from the working group chair. If on the other hand you are as mystified as I am about how the email showed up, then again apologies for the resent, but I would like the public www-forms archive to also include the record of my responses to you. Here is my response (your original email is included below that for reference): Hi Bjoern, I will be fishing out technical issues to address from your email for discussion by the working group. I will also discuss the process issuesyou raised with our W3C team contact. However, my own initial reaction to the issues you have raised is that they are not process objections to the XForms 1.1 last call. For example, you expressed concern about the definition of "QName but not NCName" in XForms 1.0. The terms QName and NCName are as well-known in the XML community as are 'but' and 'not' in the normative language in which W3C Recommendations are expressed (English). Moreover, a rigorous machine definition is provided in the XForms schema, which is referenced by the recommendation. I agree that there is a 'typo' in the table in section 8.1, which will be addressed, but it would be difficult indeed to substantiate the argument that this simple error was not easily seen to be just that. This raises a much larger issue in your email, which is that the error you raised is symbolic of Forms WG non-responsiveness to produce errata as part of maintaining XForms. Before you use this in any kind of future formal objection, I would like to ask you to please examine the 94 pages of errata that the Forms WG has produced in the following two locations: http://www.w3.org/2003/10/REC-xforms-10-20031014-errata.html (~39 pages) http://www.w3.org/2006/03/REC-xforms-20060314-errata.html (~55 pages) The problem I see here is that you are using years-old complaints about imperfections about the Forms WG, yet the above resources demonstrate that the Forms WG has vigorously striven to improve in this area. These resources are significant and tangible results that contradict your assertion of an ongoing problem. Your email also identified your concerns about the test suite. Again the Forms WG has been working quite vigorously on the test suite, and it has been significantly revamped. Moreover, work on the test suite is ongoing, in part because we will need the upgraded version for XForms 1.1. Concerns you express about the XForms 1.1 test suite will be taken into account, but test suite development is part of the W3C process required for exiting candidate recommendation, not entering last call, so again it is unclear why this would substantiate an objection to any aspect of XForms 1.1 last call. I believe you have also expressed concern over your want of an additional XForms 1.1 requirement for XForms submissions to handle a login password forms. I believe the Forms WG did take this issue under advisement, but we did also communicate to you that our focus for 1.1 was improvement over the core use cases of XForms 1.0, which is not directly focused on forms containing two controls. A W3C working group is not an infinite resource. This means that focusing on everything is an explosion, not a direction. Therefore, features that are not part of the main technical direction do not tend to become part of the *committed* requirements even if they are good ideas that might be a useful addition to our capabilities. That being said, this does not mean that suggestions for detail features are not taken under advisement. Interestingly, the thing to which you have objected, the XForms 1.1 last call, is precisely the W3C process that you *should* be using to perform a review of the actual specification to see whether the feature of concern to you is included. A W3C Recommendation may include more features than are committed in the requirements document, especially when those features result from creating the most generalized solutions for requirements that are committed. If an XForms 1.1 last call comment were to be made to indicate that a feature was missing from XForms 1.1, then the Forms WG would consider and respond to that comment. The response might be that it is not included because it is not a committed requiement for XForms 1.1, but that is a valid outcome of the process. If your last call comment is not answered, then your W3C AC Rep has the opportunity to object to advancement to candidate recommendation. If that isn't done, then the issue becomes an element of the past. However, in the case of your requested feature of submission, I believe you may have again put the cart before the horse, so to speak, by objecting to the specification on the last day of its last call without having read the document. As you have asked the Forms WG to use the W3C process, I would ask the same of you. In particular, would you please consider the new material on submissions and on XPath functions and determine whether your requested submission feature can now be satisfied. If not, please submit a last call comment explaining what you think is missing. At this point you may be concerned that there is insufficient time for you to perform a review and provide last call comments given that the last call period just expired. Although the Forms WG has already provided a review period that was twice as long as required by W3C process, the working group will be extending the review period to the end of April due to requests for extension. This extension will also give other Forms community members such as yourself another chance to review the XForms 1.1 specification and provide feedback that the Forms WG will address prior to advancement to candidate recommendation. In the meantime, although I will be putting your email and this response on the agenda for discussion and review by the Forms WG, I want to be clear that I currently do not perceive your objection as being appropriate to the XForms 1.1 last call process nor to any current efforts of the Forms WG, and as such I will not be speaking to the director about your objection unless our W3C team contact finds a specific point of W3C process compelling me to do so. This will also give you some time to consider withdrawing the objection based on the voluminous rebuttal information provided above. John M. Boyer, Ph.D. STSM: Workplace Forms Architect and Researcher Chair, W3C Forms Working Group Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software IBM Victoria Software Lab E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> Sent by: www-forms-request@w3.org 04/05/2007 10:40 PM To www-forms-editor@w3.org cc Subject 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 Wednesday, 11 April 2007 18:30:44 UTC