- From: Karl Dubost <karl@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 14:42:02 -0400
- To: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org, www-talk@w3.org
- Cc: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
At 11:07 -0500 2002-05-22, Aaron Swartz wrote: >for no good reason about backwards-compatibility. And the W3T sits >quietly, afraid to do anything to remedy the situation. Aaron... tss tss... I have read ***w3t***, so you are talking about the W3C Team. So the 70 persons who are employed by W3C. I'm one of those and we have not all of us the same ideas about the web, the community, or the standards process. I would like also to notice that we are not brainwashed when we are entering at W3C. We had a past before W3C, we still have a present where we are doing things (most of the people in the Team have personal websites and they are not difficult to find), and we will have a future after W3C except if your plan is to offer us the same destiny of Giordano Bruno. >W3C-style standards bodies clearly aren't working anymore. Perhaps >they made sense in the old days of the browser wars, but we're no >longer getting innovation from Working Groups who have so many >members that they have to form subgroups to decide what they're >going to do about deciding what they're going to do. Now speaking of W3C, there's a lot to say. In all bodies, Open communities, Consortium, governemental organization, there are mistakes, defaults and good things, because they are made of people and interaction. So good things are still hapenning at W3C and some are less enjoyable. I have my own opinions on them but I will not express them as Karl Dubost - W3C. I may express them as Karl - la-grange.net. The problem is that some people are not intellectualy honest, and even if I express my opinions as la-grange.net, they will say or quote, "Karl, Conformance Manager has said". >I humbly suggest a solution, based on comments from TimBL, SimonStl >and many others: > > * Desiging the specs are a small independent core team of people >who really know their stuff and are concerned about simplicity and >the Right Thing. Even if I tend to agree with you, because smaller specs are easier to implement, so easier to achieve quality, it's not as simple as saying that. In the context of quality, I think often that the specs are not enough long to explain the topics, I think also there are going often too fast and don't let time for implementation. Let's take for example SVG which is a huge spec, which has taken a long time, if you look at implementation, they are very good wrt to other specs. Who knows the stuff? ;) not easy to reply and you will see that in a sense, nobody knows... and hopefully, the creativity comes from the research. So I think what you wanted to say, is let a place to creativity and expression of ideas. So I wish thousand of times more participation to the W3C from governments, universities, research centers, individual people. You have forgotten two main issues. - digital divide Some people do not have access to the technology in a manner that will permit us to participate. - Cultural differences Languages English is not the main language, and even for people who are technicians and/or developers, they prefer to work or have materials in french, for example. I know that by the number of translation I did as a volunteer before working at W3C, and that I'm still doing now. Working culture Put american people, japanese people and french people in the same WG, and you will have a lot of differences of working. So for example, you can think that japanese people will agree on your choice, just because you haven't noticed that the way to express their concerns is different from yours. > * Assisting them is an open group who contributes to the >spec-writing and application-testing, letting the core team focus on >the design. Yes yes yes... and translate specs, and review them, and ask for quality. I have a question, why so many open source developers are doing so bad implementations. They have the possibility to implement specs and say look my implementation is better than the commercial of Brand X. But they often don't do it. While I tend to agree to the general and optimistic ideas of your choices, I would like to make the membership wider (criterias still to be determined) and have more people participating and less monotyped in the sense of your email (too much industries ?). So is the problem the consortium or a too small consortium and not enough representative of the Web Community? And we didn't talk about the computing education community, the publishers, etc... -- Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager http://www.w3.org/QA/ --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---
Received on Wednesday, 22 May 2002 14:44:29 UTC