xml-dev - Realistic proposals to the W3C?

[Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com]

Title: Realistic proposals to the W3C?

 I think it would be great if this group could help the XML community as a whole sort out what it wants from the W3C, what it can realistically DEMAND of the W3C, and what it must find elsewhere. If some reasonable consensus emerges, perhaps it could be quasi-formally submitted to the W3C in some form.

As a W3C participant, I don't feel the frustrations as strongly as many of you do, so my thoughts may not be nearly radical enough. I offer these simply as starting points for further discussion ...

MISSION

What does "leading the web to its full potential" mean to YOU?  Charging forward toward the Semantic Web, cleaning up the loose ends left behind by the Syntactic Web (?) or what? 

PROPOSALS, RECOMMENDATIONS, AND STANDARDS?

What do you folks WANT a "W3C Recommendation" to signify?  How much implementation experience from OUTSIDE a working group should be necessary to enshrine something as a Recommendation?  Should the W3C encourage Recommendations to be modular components that can be assembled into anything from minimal subsets to monolithic monstrosities, or should the current "one size fits all" objective be maintained? Should Recommendations be treated as "standards," should there be a something like a "Strong Recommendation" that has survived the test of time and the market, should the W3C refer well-established Recommendations to the ISO, or what?

OPENNESS

There are three types of mailing lists associated with a W3C working group: public, "interest group", and "working group".  The public lists are open to anyone and are used (as near as I can see) mostly to solicit feedback from the public.  Some working groups (the DOM anyway) try hard to quickly answer/explain/acknowledge the posts on the public mailing lists, others respond mainly in the "disposition of public comments" section of the Proposed Recommendation.  Interest Group mailing lists are open to W3C members and invited experts who wish to follow a working group's activities closely, and are (in principle) where most of the "real" discussion occurs.  Working Group lists are strictly private (not sure about the archives) to the working group and are mainly for administrivia.

Given that there's no way the W3C is going to make the detailed votes on specific proposals available to the public (sorry, it ain't gonna happen, so don't bother flaming me), what could it do to maximize the benefits of "sunshine" without drying up the information flow?  Make Interest Group mailing lists open to qualified people who agree to respect certain guidelines (such as not publicly revealing who advocates what)? Eliminate Interest Groups and encouraging all technical discussion to occur on the public mailing lists and all member-confidential stuff to remain on the WG mailing lists?  Farm out the public "brainstorming" of specs to OASIS TC's and produce SAX-like "sense of the community" proposals, and only setup Working Groups when the time comes for the heavy hitters to go into the smoke-filled rooms to sort out who can implement what when? 

CLARITY OF SPECS

What should the W3C as an organization do to encourage clearer specs?  Mandate a page limit?  Demand a relatively non-technical but "normative" Tutorial/Background paper to accompany all specs (at least at the Recommendation level)? Insist on an open source reference implementation? Mandate some other formal language description?  Remember, that whatever you suggest has to be implemented within the resources of the W3C itself and the technical (or literary) capabilities of the participants.

I'm sure there's more topics we could cover ...