-public-html
+www-archive, +Maciej
Taking this off-list because it's turning into a process discussion that
doesn't belong on public-html.
On 2010-06-09 03:48, Sam Ruby wrote:
To have the W3C specification refer readers to another specification for
an exact list of differences, and to have that other specification
indicate that the omission was due to political reasons is intolerable.
To have the HTMLWG degrade into nothing but a massive political debate,
where decisions are made based on "proposals that create the weakest
objections" — where you have demonstrated time and time again that that
simply means the loudest group wins [1] — is intolerable.
The process is designed to let people endlessly drag issues through an
insane level of bureaucracy just because, despite having every argument
soundly refuted, some people won't give up and keep coming back for more
(cf. ISSUE-4/84 (DOCTYPE), ISSUE-30 (longdesc), ISSUE-91/93/95-97
(removing elements/attributes), etc.).
If you don't like being called out on having a purely political process
in place, then you shouldn't have such a political process at all. Let
this group get back to making technically sound decisions based purely
on the merits of the argument, and stop letting bureaucracy trolls
dictate the direction that this group heads in. I'm becomming
increasingly frustrated with the way in which the HTMLWG is being run,
and being overrun by bureaucracy and people who just want to play
politics, rather than maintain rational technical discussions; and I am
losing faith in its ability to maintain its relevance.
I would like to find a way to restore the ability of this group to
function in less bureaucratic way, which would involve dropping the
whole overly-time-consuming change-proposal/counter-proposal process and
going back to a far more productive WHATWG-style, technical-discussion
environment that, despite its critics, has repeatedly shown itself to
not only function well, but to produce the most technically sound
results without degrading into political debates, at least until the
HTML WG gets involved and messes up its copy of the spec. I just worry
that this won't be done out of fear that it will upset those who are
creating the problems in this group to begin with.
[1] This has been the case with Microdata, which was split out simply to
appease the RDFa proponents with technically weak arguments about
fairness and "creating a level playing field". And it was the case here
with the statement about image analysis heuristics, where you clearly
just went with the most vocal group, rather than the most technically
sound argument; or at the very least finding a compromise solution that
involved rephrasing it to clarify the meaning, as I previously suggested.
--
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/
