Strawman resolution: reject this change. We have taken other means (e.g. WG home page) to make it easy for anyone to set the set of closed issues, and soon, the separate set of postponed issues.

The Chairs agreed that we are not going to make this change.

Someone who has not been tracking the HTML working group process day to day should be able to review which sections of the document for which there is widely perceived problem but for which the issue was closed because there was no concrete proposal delivered in time, especially since the timeouts have been produced without any clear reasoning for when the deadline was set or any consensus from the working group that the deadline was reasonable.

This "bug" in the process will be fixed when at least 2 out of 3 random non-working group member would be able to tell that, say, the issue over the "resource vs. representation" issue was only closed because Roy Fielding wasn't willing to volunteer to work on the editing with a deadline to the chair's satisfaction.

Whether you do it in the issue tracker or somewhere else isn't the question: the question is whether this is actually an "open" process where issues are closed, not because there is agreement, but because the issue timed out for procedural rather than technical reasons.

"We have taken other means (e.g. WG home page) to make it easy for anyone to set the set of closed issues, and soon, the separate set of postponed issues."

Whether this fixes the "bug" depends on whether the "other means" actually does "make it easy" to see the set of postponed issues. Personally, I think the fact that issues were postponed and not resolved should actually be marked in the review copy rather than hidden somewhere in the working group home page somewhere.

(In reply to comment #3)
> 
> This "bug" in the process will be fixed when at least 2 out of 3 random
> non-working group member would be able to tell that, say, the issue over the
> "resource vs. representation" issue was only closed because Roy Fielding wasn't
> willing to volunteer to work on the editing with a deadline to the chair's
> satisfaction.

The set of people who were not willing to volunteer to do the work of making a concrete proposal is larger than one person.  We have advertised broadly for some body -- anybody -- to step forward.

Furthermore, as the set of potential issues for which nobody is willing to make a concrete proposal is boundless, we need a criteria other than "somebody, somewhere thinks that there might be an issue, but to date has failed to state with any precision what it would take to satisfy their objection".