Partial Review of http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070326.html

Dave and TAG,

In preparing for our forthcoming F2F I have reviewed about the first
half of the 26th March 2007 version of the draft part 1 versioning
finding [1] and placed annotated copies in www-archive@w3.org at[2,3]
(.html and .doc respectively). Although three drafts have just been
published[4] to replace the previous two, the comments in this review
may still be relevant to the revised part 1 [5], so I'm making them
available for discussion (apologies that I've ended up using a word
processor to annotate the text - I am still looking for good tools for
annotating review copy - any suggestion for something more HTML
oriented).

I like the division of the part 1 finding into two parts, "terminology"
[5], which can act as a reference for the other parts, and strategies
[6].

One of my concerns is how the TAG achieving concensus on this work. As
others have previously remarked, for any given document one only has a
limited number of good reviews before becoming blinded to the text. In
trying to move the group forward toward a group concencus, I can only
see two ways forward:

1) Press ahead with the documents as they are. i think that would likely
require mean a process similar to that of a rec-track document (like
webarch) with issues lists and resolution proposals and negotiations.
This would likely dominate TAG agendas for a considerable period of
time.

2) Restructure the document(s) down into bite-sized chunks, each
focussed on some particular aspect eg. the use of open content models;
version identification; the use of must understand; fallback; and maybe
indiviudal strategies aswell indicate when and when not to use a given
strategy with exemplars drawn from the use-cases. The revised part 1,
focussing on terminology and a model for discussing langauge and
language evolution could serve as foundation for the other documents and
perhaps be separately published as a WG note.

Personnally, I think that the the second of these alternatives offers us
a more managable way forward. It allows us to publish the things that we
can agree on earlier without holding up publication on concensus over
the whole document collection at once. It also potentially allows more
of use to contribute by moving different pieces along simultaneously.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on whether this approach might work,
or if you have other constructive ideas on how to move this work
forward.

Thank you for all your hard work to date.

Best regards

Stuart
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[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070326.html
[2]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2007May/att-0065/version
ing-20070326-skw-review.htm
[3]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2007May/att-0065/version
ing-20070326-skw-review.doc 
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007May/0028.html
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070518.html
[6] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-strategies-20070518.html
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Received on Monday, 21 May 2007 14:12:24 UTC