[dsdl-discuss] Re: Confidentiality of our documents

I think it is pretty much up to each editor how they get their part
developed and crediblet to present for committee discussion. In the case of
the framework, there is obviously less scope for individualism
than other parts.

James and Murata-san have been successful with JIS and OASIS.
I am happy with my Sourceforge mailing list for Schematron.

But I would suggest that you should not release your strawman
in public yet, and certainly not announce it on XML-DEV.
Early strawmen can easily turn people for or against a technology,
they set expectations, and they provide ammunition for criticism
by opponents. There were almost no comments from the public
on XML Schemas until way after the most important decisions
were cast in stone (despite repeated please from me!) and that is
largely because it takes at least a year or three for ideas to trickle
into the consiousness.

So I would predict that the earliest you can expect much serious
public response to framework issues will be 1 year after the
XPipe and XMLPipelines proposals were published: not for several
months yet! Time is on our side :-) I have seen this one year effect
many times (during the first year, no-one can see the problem;
after three years, everyone has an opinion!) So "exposing
approaches" would be more useful than "publishing strawmen"
at the moment, IYKWIM. The purpose of an approach is to
help explore the functional possibilities, the function of a strawman
is a technology we can judge and pull down.

I would prefer that we could have a couple of "approaches" available
in a couple of weeks instead (I want to make one up, too!). When thinking
about openness and participation, it is important to realise that most
people are not nearly up-to-speed enough to critique a single approach:
by presenting alternatives we can bring more ideas out of the
woodwork.

Instead, I suggest
 1) Set up a public forum to discuss the framework
 2) Concentrate first on gathering use-cases and exposing different
   technical approaches
 3) Resist any temptation to move faster than the next obvious step.
 4) Prepare the strawman and circulate it to people whose judgement
   you value, especially to industrial publishing users.
 5) Have a couple of strawmen ready, showing different approaches.

But I am happy if we are seen to Zag whereever W3C Zigs, if it helps
user acceptability and makes a better standard.

Ultimately, any decisions are made by the National bodies voting.

Cheers
Rick

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