Re: [SVGMobile12][SVGT12-425]: Please extend the Last Call period

Hi Maciej,

Thank you for your comment. We understand and partially share your concerns, but have to find a feasible compromise between generating a high quality spec and finishing it in a reasonable time.

As Chris Lilley announced with this email http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2006Jan/0178.html the LC review period has been extended to January 27, 2006.

We hope that this is a reasonable compromise.

Minor changes can still be done during CR period and other working groups, such as the CDF and webapps WGs, are addressing some of the issues with integrating SVG in compound documents in parallel.

Andreas Neumann
Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich
Member of the W3C SVG Working Group


>Now that many have dug deeper into the spec, using the bare minimum  
>Last Call period of 3 weeks, in a block that heavily overlaps a major  
>holiday season in places where many interested parties live, seems  
>inappropriate.

>Specifically:

>* The specification is extremely large. The PDF version is 352 pages.  
>It is aggressive to expect to proofread even a novel of that length  
>in 3 weeks, let alone a technical specification.

>* Many issues have been identified, some of the quite serious, by  
>people who have yet to get all the way through the spec. This  
>strongly implies that more issues are lurking in the remainder. I  
>have seen serious problems in nearly every section of the spec that I  
>have read closely. These include not just "spec lawyer" problems or  
>language fine-tuning, but contradictions with other w3c specs,  
>contradictions within the spec itself, serious security flaws and  
>language that is meaningless as written.

>* The spec references many other w3c specs, and in some cases  
>textually includes subsets of them. This requires close reading of  
>the other specs in addition to the 352 page SVG 1.2 Tiny  
>specification itself. This cannot be written off as a minor issue  
>because there are in fact many conflicts. In other cases, the spec  
>calls for behavior that is randomly different from other XML  
>applications such as XHTML, requiring still further specs (and  
>implementations, where there is de facto standard behavior) to be  
>examined.

>* The previous Last Call period generated a flood of comments,  
>finding many serious problems. In some cases reviewers gave up part way.

>* Many comments from the previous Last Call have not been addressed  
>in a satisfactory manner; in some cases the WG did not even make the  
>changes they said they were making in response to comments.

>For all these reasons, the time alotted is hardly adequate. I don't  
>accept the argument that "the industry is pushing to have this spec  
>released". No one is well-served by the release of a broken  
>specification.

>Therefore I request:

>* Please extend the last call period to a reasonable amount of time.  
>At least three additional weeks seems like the bare minimum, ideally  
>considerably more.

>* Please have at least on additional Last Call before proceeding to  
>CR to ensure that issues raised during this Last Call are addressed  
>in a satisfactory manner.

>Regards,
>Maciej

Received on Thursday, 12 January 2006 16:13:22 UTC