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   Re: [xml-dev] Avoding a repeat of W3C XSD - was Re: [xml-dev] IsWeb 2.0

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Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * Robin Berjon wrote:
>>Right now the first reality check is LC, and that's
>>often way too late to go back and solve major issues.
> 
> Working Groups are free, and it's even recommended, to request review
> from interested parties as early as useful, review from horizontal re-
> view groups such as WAI, I18N, and QA in particular. Working Groups
> are further expected to ensure that organizations represented in the
> group have completed their review of the document before going to last
> call. There are also many documents that are supposed to help here,
> many issues can be resolved early following recommendations in various
> documents such as W3C's Manual of Style, the Character Model, various
> TAG findings, RFC 3552, W3C's QA Specification Guidelines and so on,
> for those you don't even need external reality checks.

I'm quite aware of all that. The issue is that all this relies on 
voluntary effort on behalf of WGs to actually apply all or at least part 
of these reality checks as they go, as opposed to at the end. Experience 
shows that this pretty much never happens (which isn't to say that there 
are always major issues). Do you have an exception in mind?

More importantly, since separation of concerns being important, I'm not 
interested in turning the W3C into a B&D club, I believe that specs that 
go spectacularly wrong do so from the start and just keep on doing so. 
At least a minimum amount of enforced sanity checking before LC would 
IMHO help a lot.

> If you want to try Big Bang integration at Last Call instead, you get,
> well, a Big Bang. No surprises there. It's difficult to believe that
> Working Groups need to be made aware of this, or, worse, that getting
> to Recommendation faster needs to be enforced at some level outside
> the individual Working Groups.

Oh trust me WGs do definitely need to be made aware of this. And no one 
*wants* Big Bang integration at LC, an accumulation of inexperience, 
industry pressure, lack of time or attention, etc. just make it happen. 
It's very much certain that there's no recipe for systematic success, 
but I'm pretty sure that we can come up with ways to prevent some of the 
more catastrophic failures.

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Senior Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/




 

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