xml-dev - W3C public lists (was Re: The Power of Groves)

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

At 08:26 PM 2/8/00 -0500, Michael Champion wrote:>
>Forgive my monumental naivete, but are the Groves advocates just so totally
>cynical about the W3C process that they don't think it's worthwhile to raise
>points such as the one Eliot Kimber makes to the InfoSet people, do you do
>so privately and get the same non-response that Nils seems to have gotten,
>do you not care what the InfoSet WG recommends, or what?

I probably shouldn't get this started, but I've never received an official
reply to any specific comments I've posted regarding W3C specs from anyone
involved in their development.  (Mostly I haven't even gotten unofficial
replies.)

General comments and questions do get answered, notably on www-html and
www-style, but www-style is the only W3C list where I've ever had much luck
getting real and public replies from participants in the development
process.  (www-style is also the liveliest community I've found in these
lists.)

Maybe it's just that I spent too much time on XLink, where some of my
comments may have had an effect, though without anyone ever letting me know
that.  That list mysteriously woke up in September of last year, long after
I'd stopped paying attention to it because of its apparent /dev/null
tendencies.

I haven't participated on the Infoset list, and it does appear to have a
few more 'real' replies to comments on it than some of the other lists I've
participated on. (I've heard good and bad about www-dom as well.)  Nils
hasn't received any on-list replies, however, from what I can see in the
archives.

I can't say (as an outsider) that I've never seen much evidence that these
mailing lists are taken especially seriously as a whole.  The traffic that
seems to be taken most seriously is W3C insiders talking on the public
lists for whatever purpose.   

Replying publicly to such messages on a regular basis might make people
feel that they could make a difference by posting to such lists, and
generate a lot more traffic than currently exists.

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Simon St.Laurent
XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed.
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth
http://www.simonstl.com