[whatwg] some issues

[Ian Hickson]

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
>>
>> I'm using "open" in the senses of:
>> * Accessible to all; unrestricted as to participants: an open
>>   competition.
>> * Free from limitations, boundaries, or restrictions: open registration.
>> * Free of prejudice; receptive to new ideas and arguments: She listened
>>   to the proposal with an open mind.
>
> I'm amazed I didn't believe a WG with even less openness than the W3C
> could exist, let alone created.

In what way is what I describe above more closed than the W3C? As far as I
can tell, the W3C is not open in _any_ of the ways described above, nor is
it more open than the WHATWG in any way that the WHATWG is closed.


> Thanks for the clarification on to what you mean by openness (which
> seems to be closed other than you can post to our mailing list)

Yes, the office is closed in every sense except that the door is wide
open. That's like saying "the grocery store is closed other than their
letting customers in for trade".


> [my quote trimmed to just the salient part to make sure I'm confirming
> the right bit, it's not intended to mislead]
> > > > If the WHAT-WG come out say - "not everything's public, it's not an
> > > > open process,
> >
> > Sure we have. In fact we've never said anything _but_ this.
>
> The guiding prinicple was for an open process:
>
> | Open process
> | The Web has benefited from being developed in an open environment.
>
> So either it's not an open process as you've "never said" or you're
> going against the position paper that was supposed to be what told us
> this was all about - which is it?

We used the word "open" to mean its dictionary definitions that I quoted
above. We did not use it to mean the strange definition that you came up
with, which I believe is better termed a "verbose process" or maybe
"transparent process", and which is what I assumed you meant by "open"
above. (Unless you are changing definitions half-way through your
argument?) There certainly has never been anything transparent about the
process in which the WWW was created, so why would we claim there had been
in our process document?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'