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At 11:09 PM -0600 11/14/02, Shelley Powers wrote:
>The RDF Working Group's efforts have been public and accessible from the
>beginning. They've always been open to comments and suggestions. There's not
>just one but at least three mailing lists associated with the RDF efforts,
>and others associated with peripheral efforts (such as RSS 1.0). I've never
>once not had any member of the working group not respond to one of my
>comments. Yet now, when they put out six documents -- six -- asking for
>feedback, all people can do is beat on their effort in what looks to me to
>be almost a knee jerk reaction.
Once again, we see that the W3C process is simply deaf to fundamental
criticisms. W3C working groups are pretty good about accepting minor
corrections and suggestions for improvements within the frameworks
they've laid out. However, they absolutely cannot hear when a chorus
of voices is screaming that the framework itself is bad, will not
support the weight they're trying to lay on it, and should be torn
down.
The comments that have been raised here are very substantive.
Ignoring them will either lead to people ignoring RDF or to people
having massive problems as a result of adopting RDF.
>I thought it might be nice for the RDF critics to be reminded of the
>personal work and effort that has gone into this specification, this RDF
>that generates so much passion. Perhaps you might spare a moment or to
>consider that you might, just might, not be able to do better at a meta-data
>strategy yourselves if given the opportunity.
None of this is a justification for foisting a bad spec on the world.
First principle: do no harm. No matter how much work has gone into
the spec, if it's fundamentally broken, kill it, no matter who's
toes you step on. That will always waste less work than moving on
with a harmful spec.
The DOM working group is one of the few to have learned this lesson.
They did kill abstract schemas. If only the namespaces, RDF, schemas,
XSLT 2, and query groups could learn the same lesson.
I'm wondering if there needs to be a new step in the W3C process that
attempts to determine whether a spec has achieved reasonable
consensus. A spec that has failed to do so would be rejected, at
least for a while. If in the interrim the technology achieved
adoption and proved to be a good idea, eventually consensus would be
reached. However, looking at the two specs that have been passed over
significant opposition (Namespaces and Schemas), experience indicates
that a lot more weight needs to be given to dissenting voices than is
now the case. I think more than a simple majority should be required
to move a spec forward, and there should be an opportunity for
non-working group members other than Tim Berners-Lee to veto a spec.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
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