xml-dev - Re: Improved writing -- who's going to pay for it?

[Joseph Kesselman/Watson/IBM <keshlam@us.ibm.com>]

Quoth Simon St.Laurent:

>Readers are invited to submit comments on specs, but readers are not
>invited to participate in the development of specs as participants.

Certainly non-W3C members don't get a chance to get involved in all the
details of development -- but most of the WG's I've interacted with have a
public mailing list and are reasonably responsive to questions and
suggestions posted there.

> I'd
>suggest that this barrier doesn't exactly encourage readers to take on
copy
>editing W3C specs as a gift to an organization that isn't exactly
inclusive.

It isn't a gift to the organization any more than participation in the
Interest Groups and Working Groups is. Think of it as an investment in
helping the spec to more successfully address your needs. If that's a
"gift", it's to the community and to yourself.

And if you do it often enough and well enough, there's an outside chance
that you might wind up more deeply involved as an Invited Expert, whether
you're a W3C member or not.

>It's a nice dream to have readers submitting cleanly edited paragraphs,
but
>I'd suggest that in cases like this it is _only_ a dream.

I have to disagree. The DOM WG has gotten wording suggestions via our
public list, and when it makes sense to do so we've adopted them, either
directly or with some tweaking. Of course the whole section may be
rewritten completely in the next working draft, but that's the nature of
the beast; I've had folks rip apart and restructure my paragraphs too.

>It's not like they're a shoestring organization that doesn't collect dues

It's not like they're a huge organizion with a profit center and a
budgetary surplus either, as far as I know.

It isn't a matter of owning up to the problem. It's a matter of finding the
resources to fix it.


______________________________________
Joe Kesselman  / IBM Research