Re: ISSUES: First draft of open issues document.

On Tue, 2002-03-05 at 08:43, Lynn Andrea Stein wrote:
> 
> 
> Dan Connolly wrote:
> > Also... there are rules that say we have
> > to close all our issues before we're done:
> > 
> > "5.2.2 Last Call Working Draft
> > 
> > Entrance criteria. Before advancing a technical report to Last Call
> > Working Draft, the Working Group must:
> > 
> >    [...]
> >    2. formally address all issues raised by Working Group participants,
> > other Working Groups, the Membership, and the public about the Working
> > Draft."
> > 
> >         -- http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010719/tr.html#last-call
> > 
> > So we should excercise some discipline in putting stuff on the issues
> > list, since we'll need to resolve it before we can claim victory.
> 
> 
> A proposal:  Can we list things with some weasel wording, like:
> 
> Decide whether to deal with issue X (or whether issue X is in our
> scope...), so that "formally address" would be satisfied by deciding it
> wasn't something we were going to deal with?

In short: yes.

In detail:

It's somewhat traditional to deal with these on the other end;
i.e. rather than weaseling about whether it's an issue, we
sorta weasel about whether it's resolved.

In particular, we can resolve an issue by deciding *not* to
address it in our language; i.e. postponing it to future
work. We have to be careful to demote any relevant requirements
to objectives while we're at it, and deal with any user
complaints that arise.

For examples/precedents, see:

  Issues Postponed till a future Version of RDF
  http://www.w3.org/2000/03/rdf-tracking/#futures

"postponed" can also be spelled "out of scope", ala:
  "The WG believes this is out of scope."
  -- http://www.w3.org/2000/05/12-xmlschema-lcissues.html#revisit-design


> I would very much like to see someplace where we can record all possible
> open issues, knowing that some of them will not be resolved.  My
> suggestion is intended to provide a way that we can put something onto
> this issues list without committing to resolving it before we're done. 
> (I think it's good to know what we haven't dealt with, too.)
> 
> Lynn
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2002 09:52:43 UTC