Re: Last Call comments

* Dean Jackson wrote:
>The plan is to release another draft within the Last Call (for both
>Tiny and Full). My reading of the W3C Process is that we must
>formally address the comments when advancing stages (to Call
>for Implementations), not when we release another draft at the
>same stage. It's as if we are extending the deadline of our
>existing Last Call.

If the document has been substantively changed at any time after a Last
Call Announcement it is returned to the Working Group for further work.
To advance on the Recommendation Track there needs to be a new working
draft. This might indeed go along with a Last Call Announcement as noted
in section 7.4.6, but there are certain entrance criteria for this step,
one of which is formally addressing all comments since the last step
(which would be the previous Last Call Announcement).

I do not think it would make sense to allow Working Groups to skip the
entrance criteria, you would risk that known issues get reported again
and might find that substantive changes are necessary to address already
known issues, which then risks that you have to publish yet another Last
Call Announcement; or that some reviewers do not bother to review the
draft due to known issues and rather wait for the CR, which would risk
that substantive issues are raised very late in the process.

In my opinion, the Working Group should rather publish normal Working
Drafts until the entrance criteria for a Last Call announcement are met,
this would avoid many problems and allow for a much shorter (second)
Last Call period. It is also common practise to publish such drafts
addressing issues raised during Last Call, Webarch, Charmod, CSS 2.1,
and most of the XPath/XQuery suite did this, for example.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Monday, 28 March 2005 22:31:16 UTC