Issue tracking for HTML 2.0 document (HyperNews?)

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 94 01:14:09 EDT
Message-id: <9409210512.AA17065@austin2.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-wg@oclc.org>
Subject: Issue tracking for HTML 2.0 document (HyperNews?)
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Just to reiterate: the task of publishing the HTML 2.0 document as an
internet RFC has an owner and a deadline: the owner is Mike Knezovich
at Spyglass, and the deadline is the December IETF meeting.
(see http://www.acl.lanl.gov/HTML/html-archive.messages/267.html)

Ultimately, though, my name goes on this thing. The world seems to
associate my name with it (I get email/phone calls pretty much daily
about it.) And since I won't be at the Chicago meeting, I'd like
to be able to see evidence that progress is being made, and that
there is a plan that covers all the outstanding issues.

The current plan goes like this:

	* the document gets revised and released
	* folks send comments to html-wg (or to me, and I forward
	them to html-wg)
	* repeat until equillibrium is reached

Unfortunately, we're going through the loop only about once a month
(last release was Aug 22), and the comments are not diminishing.
Worse: old comments keep getting repeated and not addressed.

At this rate, we will not meet the December deadline.

I'm willing to hear other suggestions, but the suggestion I
have is better issue tracking tools. Specifically, the use
of the HyperNews Web application for issue tracking.

We talked about using WIT for this purpose a long time ago,
but as WIT was rather raw and unstable, we chose email.

I think it is time to revisit this decision. HyperNews is
mature and stable, and running with sufficient connectivity/cpu
resources. See, for example:

	http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/www/html/lang.shtml

I propose we take the Aug 22 release as "ground zero" and
propose changes to it and/or log defects using hypernews.
Someone should troll the html-wg archives, copying/linking
all unresolved issues to the hypernews issue tree.

Here is a quick list of some of the outstanding issues:

	* There is no plain text, RFC format rendition
	  of the document

	* The DTD Reference isn't quite right (inclusions/exceptions)

	* The DTD should(?) be changed from 3 files to 1

	* The ISOLat1 stuff in the DTD needs to be spelled out

	* The about/status stuff needs reorganizing

One way to go about this is for the writer(s) to periodically post a
message saying, e.g., "We're doing the forms stuff now. The current
version is at ... Speak now or forever hold your peace." This could
work alongside the hypernews stuff or instead of it.

Some logistical questions:

 - is one big list of issues OK, or do we need to organize them?

 - does hypernews support "closing" a subtree? We should move
	an issue tree from the "open" list to the archive of
	"closed" issues once we think we're done with it

 - what about access control? Does anybody have time to
   "clean up the mess"? Can Daniel server as "editor"?
   How about TimBL?

 - should I install hypernews on the HaL http server?

 - Daniel: do you have time to "suport" this stuff? i.e.
   write very detailed instructions, answer questions, etc?

Dan