Re: a/@ping discussion (ISSUE-1 and ISSUE-2), was: An HTML language specification vs. a browser specification

On Nov 22, 2008, at 13:39, Julian Reschke wrote:

>>> [I see] an overwhelming number of comments that indicate it isn't  
>>> desirable in HTML.
>> Volume of comments one way or the other is not a technical argument.
>
> But volume of comments can be an indicator of whether something has  
> consensus or not.


Volume of comments is not a good indicator of consensus. A list could  
have 2000 emails of 1 person disagreeing with 1000 other people. It's  
a known[1] phenomenon that a small number of dissenters (even when the  
small number is 1) can cause an appearance of a large controversy on a  
mailing list.

(Assuming that consensus is  looser than unanimity.)

[1] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645
-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Saturday, 22 November 2008 14:14:18 UTC