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On Friday 17 May 2002 16:43, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> What strikes me as most interesting about this is that people outside
> the working group effectively had veto power over the spec. If it had
> been left to merely the group producing the spec to decide when it
> was done, this would not have happened. I can think of at least two
> major W3C specs that would possibly have been vetoed if people
> outside the working group were allowed to vote, and I can see a few
> more coming down the road. External checks and balances are a good
> thing. The W3C process is sorely lacking a step in the process where
> potential users and implementers have an opportunity to reject an
> entire spec and send it back to the drawing board, even without the
> working group's consent.
<nostalgia>
Yes. I've been helping out a little on the XER working group, and it's
actually quite useful to have comments coming back from all over the world -
and being *forced* to pay attention to them! IIRC Japan or China made a
wonderful job of going through everything with a fine toothed comb
cross-referencing everything and isolated several little bugs that we -
already too familiar with the specs, and therefore blind to them! - had
missed. We had a proper formal meeting where we sat with the lists of
comments, and each one had to be acknowledged as a flaw and fixed, or
explained why it wasn't a flaw (but a FEATURE!) and all that.
I'm quite hazy on the administrative details, but the overall effect was very
good. It provided thoroughness... without frustration.
Man, I wish I had more time off of work to go to the next meeting (sob)...
that was fun...
</nostalgia>
ABS
--
Alaric B. Snell
http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/
Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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