Positions are not mutually exclusive? about standards-positions HOT 4 CLOSED

I think the current set of positions tends to conflate our level of involvement (fact) with whether it's important and good for the web (opinion). I'd rather have the decision space focus more on whether we think the technology is good or bad, and if good, whether we think it's a high priority or not. (I'm also a bit concerned about the semantics of undecided vs defer.)

Another possibility is focusing on two yes/no/undecided questions:

• is the problem important to solve?
• is the proposed solution good (vs. harmful)?

from standards-positions.

That's a good way of framing it. If others feel we need to convey these things, perhaps it's best to split it out so we end up with only a few states per thing.

from standards-positions.

I tend to agree with the split proposed by @dbaron.

Re: is the proposed solution good (vs. harmful)?

Frequently (especially for W3C specs) it is not that simple, and there's a lot of W3C specs that are basically "meh". They are not good solutions, nor are they outright "harmful" in the way that privacy/security harming specs are harmful.

For example there are some (many?) W3C RECs that don't really "harm" the web, are more incompetent than harmful, and will likely die a quiet death from neglect in a few years.

The other actual harm I'd like to avoid is the timesuck of spec advocacy from zealots. We know from experience that various specs/subjects from W3C can attract legions (if not at least a passionate few) that have more time to spend writing long essays in bugzilla and email that seem "reasonable" than we have time / people / resources to pick them apart. For such specs we typically refrain from "Formal Objections" partially for this reason.

Any outright public negative states (e.g. "defer") are a potential magnet for advocacy abuse and thus a timesuck for those of us who would be drawn into defending Mozilla's decisions.

I don't know how to avoid attracting that timesuck harm (DoPA), other than conflating (simplifying) states like "defer" with "undecided" (as I think dbaron was suggesting).

from standards-positions.

Seems this was resolved by #41.

from standards-positions.