Discussion (www-html) vs. requests (www-html-editor)

I think this has been said, but I don't see it in the archives
of the last couple months, so I'll risk being redundant...

Please note:

"This document is the "Last Call Working Draft" of "XHTML Basic". The
Last Call
review period ends at 2359Z on 15 March 2000. Please send review
comments before
the review period ends to www-html-editor@w3.org. 

Public discussion of HTML takes place on www-html@w3.org (archived). To
subscribe
send an email to <www-html-request@w3.org> with the word subscribe in
the subject
line."
	-- XHTML™ Basic
	W3C Working Draft 10 February 2000
	http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/WD-xhtml-basic-20000210/

and:

"Public discussion on HTML features takes place on the mailing list
www-html@w3.org (archive).

Please report errors in this document to www-html-editor@w3.org."
	-- XHTML™ 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language
	A Reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0
	W3C Recommendation 26 January 2000
	http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126

Keep in mind that www-html is an unmoderated public discussion forum,
and the W3C working groups and specification editors aren't obliged
to read all the traffic. So it's fine to float ideas here,
but please don't be dissappointed if you don't get any response
from the editors/WGs; they might just be busy with other stuff.

The editors/WGs *are* obliged to deal with specific change requests
sent to www-html-editor. If you don't get a response from a message
you send there (at least in the form of your comment integrated
into the next draft) then feel free to make a fuss. Do be patient...
the editor might only scan that mailbox every other week or so.
And do be specific. The editors are not obliged to respond
to reports that just say "it's broken. fix it." without at
least suggesting how it could be fixed.

As Arjun noted, we don't have an ombudsman, but we do have

	"Dave Raggett, Ian Jacobs, Masayasu Ishikawa, contact persons for
HTML."
	-- http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/

available if you're expecting a response and not getting one.

(Incidentally, we have started discussing some sort of ombudsman
position,
since the staff are increasingly having trouble keeping track of
everything
that's going on.)

Note also that we've recently made the www-html-editor archive available
to the public at:
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/


I made a comment on the XHTML Basic spec just before that
archive was made public, and I copied it to www-html because last
call comments are supposed to be public. I think that introduced
some confusion about how these lists work. Sorry.

-- 
Dan Connolly
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 18 February 2000 17:26:58 UTC