Re: TAG productivity, elections, and httpRange-14

On 4/23/2012 6:27 PM, Larry Masinter wrote:
> The charter does not mention "findings".

No, but it says as the first mission of the TAG [1]:

"to document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture and 
to interpret and clarify these principles when necessary;"

Note that it does not say "document community consensus". It also goes on 
to say:

"The TAG will not just document what is widely accepted; it will also 
anticipate growth and fundamental interoperability problems"

That seems pretty clearly to anticipate the need for the TAG to document 
ideas that are not yet widely accepted. Findings seem to me to be very much 
in that spirit.

 > Mark any 'finding' more than a year old as 'historical', and start with 
a clean slate.

I think the TAG could do much more to advertise and spread the word about 
what's in some of the better findings, but as it is I have found many of 
them to be very helpful as points of reference, including in recent 
discussions. I think that dropping after a year any finding that doesn't 
have REC-level consensus after a year would waste a huge amount of 
important work that the TAG has done over a decade. It's pretty clear what 
TAG Findings are: the considered opinion of the TAG at the time they were 
published. As I say, I have found a number of the findings to be very 
helpful, and I often reference them when people ask me for information 
about Web architecture.

Noah


[1] http://www.w3.org/2004/10/27-tag-charter#Mission

Received on Monday, 23 April 2012 23:32:12 UTC