Re: Charters for review

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> You mean one of the lessons that led to the structure of the Web APIs 
> WG? One of the lessons coming out of that is that there are only a 
> handful of people in a group who are able to successfully produce a 
> spec, so aiming for too many of them at a time is still a recipe for 
> failure. On the other hand, the handful of editors available, if they 
> are prepared to keep working, can do one and then another and then 
> another, if they can be done more or less sequentially (with a few 
> editors working together some overlap can be handled reasonably).

Yes.

> > *Each* time a feature is discussed, the WG writes the test cases for it.
>
> Yes, I think that is the ideal.

I would even call that the utopy, sorry to say. The reality is the
following one : each time a feature is discussed, the WG writes the test
cases for it and for all other features that can interact, one way or
another, with it... I started the CSS 3 Selectors test suite ages ago,
and we still discover issues today. From my personal point of view, and
please remember the Selectors draft was the first one released directly
with a test suite, test suites NEVER reach completion when dealing with
specs like HTML, CSS or stuff that are presentation-oriented.
First because we're only humans, and do leave holes and gaps and errors
in our specs whatever our investment ; second because we're
purists and want to test everything, specify everything.
Hey, to deliver the impossible, more time is needed :-)

> Actually I think far too little attention is paid to authoring tools by 
> W3C as a whole, and they are extremely important to the long-term 
> future. It is great that people can code by hand, but browsers mostly 
> have to follow what authoring tools produce anyway (as well as the few 
> rogue hand-coders at abnormally popular sites).

I always love when you throw something like that in the air hoping
glazou is going to catch it, chaals :-) You're lucky there's a free
hotspot in the area and I have 15 minutes to kill :-)

You are totally spot on ; most of our specs never cared about the
editing side, a bit of paradox when the reason given for that is "users
don't have to deal with the technical side, tools will be here to help".
And that's clearly, with my Nvu hat on, why I am seeing XHTML 2 as
something that will never hit the market. With the so-called purity of
XHTML 2, we're heading to tag-soup again, because authoring tools will
hardly cope with it. Trust me on that please...

</Daniel>