Let me apologize for the tone in which this was written. At the time I was mad at what Mark Pilgrim was saying (I think it’s fair to say he’s known for some crude commentary at times) and ended up viewing other conversations in a less than charitable light as a result.

In reviewing this now, I agree that you had no ill intentions or unduly unkind comments for me to criticize you for. In particular, I misconstrued your Creative Comments statements in a broad-blanket fashion that was unfair.

Thank you for noting the errors in what I construed, and providing your actual criticisms. I agree that criticism can and should happen.

Apparently I was involved in a bunch of drama and didn’t know it? In my experience most of these sorts of drama/politics claims tend to both be inaccurate and not very productive. Some of them border on trolling, and thus I tend to ignore them in order to focus on more positive, productive ends.

To address a couple of factual points in your blog post:

1. Ian asked me for “feedback” (per the IRC links in your post) on use-cases – not vetting. I know the terminology distinction is minor, feedback on many aspects of HTML5 is strongly openly encouraged by a broad range of people, whereas “vetting” sounds like some sort of qualification process. I gave feedback, and did not perform any sort of “vetting/qualification” role.

2. neither Ian Hickson nor I “attack Creative Commons”.

I’m fairly well known for being a longtime strong supporter of Creative Commons the organization, and have been publicly Creative Commons licensing my presentations for years.

What I have criticized is:

a. the original Creative Commons RDF-in-HTML comments technology which nearly no-one used and was quickly superceded/dwarfed by use of the much simpler rel-license microformat in 2004.

b. more recently, as noted in the IRC archive, ccREL – for having LOTS of issues, too many to document here, but in particular, being contrary in design to one of the goals of Creative Commons, which is to reduce license proliferation. More details here:

http://microformats.org/wiki/licensing-brainstorming#ccREL_issues

Creative Commons is a great organization. Unfortunately they’ve had mis-steps when it has come to inventing technology to serve their ends (mostly because of the unnecessary complexity and invisible data flaws which come with using various flavors of RDF syntaxes).

One can very much (and should!) criticize any such technology when it fails to support the higher-level goals and objectives of the organization.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009May/0061.html

looks quite promising. I’m particularly impressed at Shelley’s engagement and tone (given her expressed frustration with some of the players and aspects of the situation). Good show and I hope good things come out of it.

I do care quite a bit about process at the W3C (since I regularly try to get specs through there) and I care about general professional standards and about ethical behavior. Hence the commentary.

Please don’t attribute views to me that I’ve not actually expressed (or, for that matter, even implied!) It’s one of my pet peeves. Thanks!

I see you are asking for the data from which Ian derived his use cases (on the HTML WG mailing list). I’ll be interested to see what comes of that. Of course, in the end, the use cases will have to be evaluated on their own merit as well.

@Kyle. First, Mark Pilgrim is definitely *not* a “frequent conversationalist on the public WhatWG IRC channel”. At least, not in my observation. (Just correcting a fact there. Your point is probably untouched regardless of whether he is or not.)

“”"The fact that it seems unreasonable to you that I suggest professional behavior from a body of individuals writing an international web standard is startling to me.”"”

I don’t know that it is required of professional behavior to take note and/or publicly censure someone for off hand comments made in a chat room. I’m not even sure that it is required of (overall) professional behavior not to make off hand comments in a chat room. People say all sorts of things all the time. People vent all the time. Chat and email make things that were once ephemera and private public and permanent. Some people think that means we should behave as if we are to be on our best behavior all the time. Other people think we must try to direct our attention differentially.

(This is different as to whether it is *productive* to make off hand comments in a chat room.)

For example, it’s not uncommon to regard public policing as being unprofessional as well. (E.g., on many mailing lists, it’s the norm to complain about bad behavior *privately*.)

Personally, I tend to regard, as I said earlier, sober sounding accusations of unprofessionalism much more serious than over the top personal insult. After all, the latter tends to discredit itself and the speaker (at least, it tends to put readers on their guard). The former tends to be accepted and thus can damage the reputation of the target of the comment.

In any case, I’m fine saying that Pilgrim’s comments were unhelpful. The fact of this conversation shows that.

Finally, I’m still confused by the mix of bias accusations and “generating a perception of bias” accusations. I tend to regard the former as primary, so if you would explain again to me the evidence of bias about RDFa, i.e., its existence, it’s influence, and the problem with both (without regard to perception issues, which I think are separate), I would be grateful.

As for trusting “any one individual” with the future of HTML5, I don’t see that anyone (I hope!) is advocating that. Ian is a focal player, clearly, but it’s not like he’s operating in a vacuum. It’s very unclear to me (as a close watcher of the HTML5 WG) *what’s* going to happen. Ruby (who has more formal power in the group than Ian and a lot of support in and out of the W3C) seems to be angling (in my opinion) for a more minimal version of HTML5 wherein every part of it has consensus (by his standards). He seems rather sympathetic to RDFa and distributed extensibility. Rob Sayre’s draft of the spec is very different than Ian’s (but I don’t know if he’d support RDFa). It’s not even clear to me that Ian won’t include RDFa, in the end, in his draft. I don’t know that that’s the best outcome. (BTW, Ian is hardly the only person who has expressed antipathy to RDFa (or some of the design choices). See . And it’s easy to find Roy bashing Ian :))

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009May/0010.html

Shelley’s comments reflect my opinion on the evidence of bias regarding Ian’s consideration of RDFa. If you feel that these examples somehow fail to illustrate the issue, then we can simply agree to disagree. Regardless of whether there is bias, there’s been a failure to help prevent that perception, which once again will hamper the overall HTML5 effort.

Regarding Ian’s bias or lack thereof with the spec: Ultimately, what this comes down to is that I lack the ability to trust any one individual with the future of HTML5. There’s simply too much at stake and too much room for error. Ian may be a great guy. That’s not the issue at hand as to whether he’s capable of writing a good spec. The question is whether the results will suitably reflect all interests involved (or have at least fairly addressed them.) At least with an attempt at genuine consensus, you can show that the effort was made. At present, I believe there’s a genuine lack of evidence that bias isn’t playing a part here, consciously or otherwise.

No, not public comments on the spec to the W3C — ones Ian found in my weblog.

As for pointing out the one IRC that says something relatively positive about RDF, I can point out several in the last few days where Ian has been less than complimentary about RDF.

Bijan, no, I don’t agree that what Ian did was best. Evidently, you do. As for judging whether he’s done a good job of condensing the use cases down or not, how can I tell? Do I have access to the emails, comments, etc he’s used?

And now, I’ve seen him take one of the use cases, and in the WhatWG list, spell out his reasoning why it’s not a valid use case. He’s already decided, without any form of discussion. The only discussion seems to be, email him with your thoughts. Don’t take my word, read it yourself.

This isn’t some cute little hacky markup you’re all putting together. This isn’t scientific research. This is supposed to be the next version of HTML — this is massively important. Too important to have one person make all the decisions. I don’t know how you all can think otherwise.

Obviously, you do, though. Great, good for you. But it’s not good for me. I no longer trust what comes out of the HTML5 effort. I have no faith that it is the best effort.

This has all boiled down to our trust in one individual. This isn’t a team effort, or consensus, or ensuring comprehensive coverage of all interests. This is all hinging on our faith in one individual. That should be enough to alarm everyone, regardless of how you feel about the person.

If you really doubted Ian, why not just ask for the text that was the basis of his derivation? You could then examine them and Ian’s result and make some judgement about his ability to select and present use cases. That would be much better than the insinuation that he’s a liar.

@Shelley. “Now there speaks someone who has, most likely, also never participated in the requirements process for a business application.” I’m not sure if my experiences “count” with you (would doing so for NASA count?), but I don’t see how it’s relevant anyway. But let’s dig in.

First, I don’t see why even water cooler talk isn’t a useful source of *data*. If users of an app are complaining about some feature, then it doesn’t matter if they’ve “formally submitted” or not. Of course, you don’t take gripes at face value, but I wouldn’t take “formally submitted” comments at face value either. (Esp. as “formally submitted” is, at the moment, undefined.)

To put it simply, there’s no evidence that Ian took the blog posts comments as anything other than data for distilling use cases and requirements. That seems totally normal and appropriate. He then sent his distilled set of use cases and requirements to the WG mailing list. Which, again, is pretty normal and, I think, reasonable. You may question whether he did a good job in that or not. But it’s rather strange to claim that he’s somehow done something bizarre or out of bounds or unprofessional in that. (Note that Kyle’s point is different, to wit, that the blog post comments are likely to be a poor source of data. That can be checked, of course. But then it becomes a time management issues. If someone *can* scan through the chaff to find the wheat and is willing to…what’s the problem?)

Second, I have participated in a lot of W3C groups and spent several years specifically trying to build up a community based set of requirements for a W3C spec (OWL 2). Frankly, the kind of thing Ian’s doing doesn’t seem different in kind. For example, every WG has a public comments list and, indeed, has to take (esp. during LC) all public comments seriously. There’s *no* vetting of the comments other than they need to be mailed to a list in a certain period. Anyone can send them. You have to deal with all of them. Given that, it just makes sense to go looking for comment from interested parties or, at least, data about what they want or believe they want.

So, I don’t see that your criticisms are on point. I can see critiquing the substantive outcome (i.e., you could claim Ian did a bad job of distilling requirements and uses cases from the data, that he neglected key data, or both; but then you’d have to show that substantively). I can see critiquing the methodology (e.g., on efficiency grounds or, as I think Kyle has tried to do, on whether the methodology will support stakeholder buy-in). But I’m not sure how effective it is to claim that the outcome is bad *because* the methodology is un-specifically “inappropriate”. (Similarly, pure methodological defenses can’t make outcomes correct. For example, a methodologically impeccable survey might still be wrong!)

BTW, could you point me to some places, if you have them handy, where Ian rejects “formally submitted” use cases (perhaps this just means use cases identified as such by the submitter specifically for consideration in the design of HTML 5?) on ill-formedness grounds without giving useful criteria for well-formedness? (I’m not saying that it didn’t happen, but I like to check these things out myself.)