Looking ahead and planning

Eric W. Sink (eric@spyglass.com)
Wed, 26 Apr 95 22:55:52 EDT

I suspect that most of the dust has settled after what may have been a hectic
month of April for some. Was anyone courageous enough to attend the IETF
meeting, the WWW conference, AND WebWorld? :-)

I've been talking with a number of people about the direction of this group,
and I've been hearing a lot of good ideas. It's time to start planning
and talking about those ideas. I'm just going to give the briefest of
summaries here, and you'll be seeing more messages from me about this
next week.

First, the HTML 2 draft has landed once again in Dan Connolly's capable
hands, and he is aware of a couple of items which he needs to polish
before we tell the IESG that we're done with Last Call. Make no mistake --
HTML 2.0 is done. We're just traversing the deeper layers of "done". :-)

More importantly, a very encouraging consequence of the Danvers meeting was
the consensus that standardizing revisions of HTML beyond 2.0 should proceed
forward in bite sized pieces. The gist here is that we should write documents
describing the things we can agree on, as they reach Rough Consensus. This
will keep the group chugging along much more briskly than if we tried to
come to agreement on the entire HTML 3 draft all at once. More details
later.

Accordingly, it is time to revise the group's charter a little bit, with
new milestones. No major changes -- just to keep things current. More
details later. :-)

For the purpose of planning, I'd like to get some indication of how many
people will be able to attend the IETF meeting in Stockholm in July. I've
mentioned to a few people that I planned to attend, but then I checked the
airline fares! Basically, if you're in the US/Canada, it's impossible to
avoid a total trip cost of well over $3,000. That price tag for attending
a ~4 hour meeting is not going to make a lot of economic sense for most
people here in North America.

Please, I mean no offense to European participants in this group. Nonetheless,
I must ask: Will we have enough people there to justify an HTML WG session?
I'm not an IETF old-timer. Do the meetings at European sites typically
have lower attendance? Any way you slice it, many of the members of this
WG are located in North America, and the sheer cost and/or time committment
of attending a meeting in Europe will result in a lower average attendance.
If I can get an idea now as to the impact, we can plan more effectively.

Thanks!

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