Re: [xml-dev] Modern talking

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> i can't give you an official answer on behalf of W3C, but i can tell
> you the simple reality: we only get three or four people turning up to
> XQuery meetings, and the Working Group doesn't have resources to get
> more than errata done.  If we could find maybe thirty or a hundred
> people, from a dozen or more organizations that are W3C Members or
> might join, to pay for the work and to show that the work would be of
> wide applicability, yes, we'd happily charter new work.


Even if there were more people eager to start work on the next version, I think there's a danger they would do the wrong things. One of the problems with starting work on version N immediately after finishing version N-1 is that you don't yet have any real user feedback. You're more likely to get a sensible set of requirements if you pause for thought for a couple of years. That was actually a positive outcome of the aborted effort on XSLT 1.1: the WG spent two years working on the wrong things, then tore it up and started again, by which time it was much clearer what users actually needed.

It's also worth pointing out that every time you produce a new version, you leave some implementations behind on the old version, and this doesn't actually do anything to enhance interoperatibility, which is W3C's primary goal.

Michael Kay
Saxonica