Withdrawal of ISSUE-128

I hereby withdraw ISSUE-128 and the associated Change Proposal that I have filed per step "0. Amicable Resolution" in the Escalation Process documented in the HTML Working Group Decision Policy.

This is the last remaining parser bug on my plate for Firefox 4, and it is now very late to make changes that don't fix hard blockers. (This isn't a hard blocker.) If Firefox 4 ships in compliance with the status quo of the spec, two major browsers will have shipped with an implementation that make <figure> close <p>. Once we get to that point, I think it serves the Web best not to keep tweaking the parser behavior on this point. The ship will have sailed.

My Change Proposal got no support (i.e. objections to the counter-proposal) on the poll (http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-128-objection-poll/results). Furthermore, I am no longer myself convinced enough that the change I was proposing would be the right thing to do.

Therefore, given that the Chairs have failed to draw a conclusion from the poll and render a Decision in a timely manner, I am drawing my own conclusion and I am WONTFIXing the Firefox bug. I hope I am not failing anyone who was counting on me championing the ISSUE on their behalf. If I am, I am sorry.

I am very disappointed at how the Chairs are running the Decision Process. Hixie (as the editor) as well as writers of Change Proposals and the responders to the polls and CfCs are subject to deadlines set by the Chairs. Yet, once other have toiled under a deadline and it is the Chairs' turn to render a Decision, there seem to be no deadlines. In the case of this ISSUE, the poll was closed over a month ago, but there were intervening holidays. Yet, there are other cases, the Decentralized Extensibility ISSUE in particular, where ISSUEs remain undecided for months and months. Therefore, I'm not inclined to wait more on this one.

The WHATWG way of doing things has been criticized from time to time, but indecision isn't a fault of that process.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Saturday, 22 January 2011 17:16:29 UTC