- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:19:40 +0100
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>, "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Jonathan Rees writes: > Less technically there is the question of multiple ways to accomplish > the same end. I am not a Python programmer but I have read it has the > design goal "there should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious > way to do it." The question is not what documents contain normative > elements, but what way does W3C recommend (in preference to others) > for doing something. W3C can't be correctly described as being a > standards organization if it recommends multiple ways to do the same > thing (without giving some criterion that would guide a decision > between them). I think that's the question people are asking, even if > they're using the wrong word to do so - what would be recommended > should two recommendations be discovered to disagree. I think this is > where your advice to write (non-normative) applicability statements > comes from. I fundamentally disagree. It is a bad idea to think we are or should be in the business of trying to write tie-breaking rules -- there are all kinds of areas where specs may end up overlapping, either by design or accidentally, and trying to handle that explicitly via priority decision rules would be a never-ending process. On another thread Roy and I wrote: Roy T. Fielding writes: > Which section of the full spec is authoritative when two sections > have different requirements for the same content? The answer is that > neither is more authoritative -- it is just a bug in the spec and we > would want to fix one of them. HST replied: > Absolutely right. We uncover contradictions within _single_ specs > with some regularity, to say nothing of contradictions between specs. > Zero defects is a goal, but has never been, and indeed cannot be, a > requirement for publication as a W3C Recommendation (or any other kind > of standard). > Dealing with contradictions when they are discovered is part of "Life > after REC" for W3C Working Groups. It's why we have an errata process > (although it really should be a called a corrigenda process :-). ht - -- Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFN9K7gkjnJixAXWBoRAkQ4AJ4loPH54sSDicDP/p5K5YL6tJgz1gCeMiiy bsna1S2HdNK5xcxmRgI659k= =/H+p -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Received on Sunday, 12 June 2011 12:20:21 UTC