Shelving documents approach

On last week's call [1] we had a discussion related to the shelving of documents  [2] and whether they should remain as working drafts once shelved or converted to Notes.  

Arguments made for converting to Notes included:

1. Making a Note makes it clearer that they are not normative and will not become so

2. Having a Note could allow publication to record an earlier approach to avoid others taking the same path.

Thinking about it, there are also some good reasons for keeping the drafts as working drafts:

1. Short name confusion

Every draft has a short name which is used in managing the URL - previous revisions have that short name, as well as subsequent revisions. Changing from WD to Note of a specific  intermediate draft revision would mean some confusion, especially for subsequent work with the same short name

2. Working draft status

Working drafts are just that, drafts, and are not to be normatively referenced and so on.  Changes occur between drafts on a regular basis so this would be a common issue if people always assumed every draft was final. Thus the status of draft should be taken seriously. The text in the draft should make it clear.

3. Lessons learned

Raw drafts will not help readers unfamiliar with WG discussions and decisions to necessarily discern the lessons to be learned. If we wish to share lessons we should distill them and then share them as a lessons learned document, so they can be understood and applied.

Thus based on the above my conclusion is that we should *not* change the document types to Note but keep them as is. I have also checked with members of the team and received support for this view.

I did note that the sensor draft did not have the big loud warning that the other drafts have, so I think it should be edited to include that to avoid confusion.

regards, Frederick

Frederick Hirsch, Nokia
Chair, W3C DAP Working Group

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2012Sep/att-0131/minutes-2012-09-26.html#item07

[2] http://www.w3.org/2009/dap/#shelved

For tracker this should complete ACTION-581

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2012 20:41:00 UTC