Coding In Paradise

Moving past last call for HTML5 from Ian Hickson on 2009-02-19 (www-archive@w3.org from February 2009): "Realistically speaking, we'll never have complete consensus on everything in HTML5. At the simplest level, there are contradictory opinions on the very fundamentals of the work -- some people want error handling defined, some don't; some people want a schema, some don't; some people want APIs defined, some don't; the list is long. So consensus -- unanimity -- isn't an interesting goal. The next step down in terms of opinion-based progress is majority agreement, and I am confident that with the exception of things that need changing and will be changed in time for the next milestone, we have a majority agreement on everything in HTML5. Majority agreement in a self-selected community like an open working group is worth less than it would appear, though, because there is a selection bias: only people who are interested in both the technology and in standards development are going to take part. In the W3C working group, there is a further bar: we only allow people who are willing to put up with an inordinate amount of bureacuracy (to join) and noise to be part of the group whose opinion is measured. Statistically, therefore, the opinions of the working group almost certainly don't match the opinions of the whole Web community."