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David Megginson <david@megginson.com> wrote:
| Arjun Ray writes:
|> The WG was not allowed to say to the W3C: "we have more important things
|> to think about".
|
| We weren't? Certainly, we had to consider the needs of other WG's --
| XSLT and XHTML, for example, couldn't go to REC without Namespaces --
Yes, the "solutions as requirements" game was already in full swing by
then. It all started with RDF needing colonified names by yesterday, and
the bum's rush was on.
| but I don't remember having our agenda dictated to us by a power on
| high. The W3C director has a significant amount of power -- he
| approves the charter, chooses the staff rep for the WG, and can veto
| any spec before it goes to REC -- but he does not choose the WG
| membership or set its agenda, at least not when I was there.
That is not my recollection. When multipart names first disturbed our wa
in May 97, the issue was tabled after a lot of discussion (over 500 posts
as I recall). The only substantive outcome was adding ':' to the set of
namestart characters. (Adding ':' to NAMESTRT rather than just NAMECHAR
was a shrewd move, btw.) But just when we thought the issue was indeed
deferred, the first reorg took place and all of a sudden namespaces were
on the agenda again, urgently so, with the XML-WG hat in hand obliged to
"collect requirements" from the RDF folks and &Deity; knows who else.
And after that, even after a long round of posts in the Fall, the damn
thing just wouldn't go away. Because by then, all those other W3C
"Activities" had proceeded blithely and sanguinely with the surety that
colonified names were a done deal already. As in already by yesterday.
Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink.
|> No one is suggesting conspiracy theories. It's about how W3C Process
|> works. Some people get their way. Others may lie in the road for a
| > while, but usually they find better things to do.
|
| That's pretty much true of any work -- go to Slashdot and read about
| the internal politics of some of the big Open Source projects, which
| make the W3C look quite tame.
The difference is that Open Source projects are inherently limited. Its'
always a case of take it or leave it.
Or even fork.
Should this be our attitude towards the W3C too, then?
|
