Clarify the role of Ethical Web Principles

[chaals]

The TAG's Ethical Web Principles is a fine document overall, but it does not obviously reflect a consensus of W3C - in part because the question has never been formally put to W3C.

Using it as a basis for the vision document by reference appears to incorporate it entirely as part of the vision. In addition, in the current draft a small handful of points in EWP are referenced directly. Both of those things seem inappropriate without a clear explanation of what the status of EWP is.

I think the obvious paths forward are either to cherry-pick parts of the EWP and copy them directly into this document, or go through the effort of seeking member consensus for the EWP as part of our technical vision. (There may be other approaches that make sense too...)

[frivoal]

I think it is appropriate to make informative references to EWP, pointing to it either in general, or in relation with a few specific points. "See also this piece of thinking emanating from part of our community, it goes into more details about the sort of things we're discussing here". If it becomes a statement with endorsement from the whole community, even better, but that's not required for that kind of usage.

I think it is not appropriate to make normative dependencies on it. In other words, statements that only make sense if you go read a definition that is in EWP, or "we will follow rule 15 of section 3", or that sort of thigns.

In my view:

• the mention of EWP in the intro is fine.
• The mention of EWP in section 5 is somewhat awkward, but would be fine if/once we accept this PR: Capture what we do, not just how we do it, in the Vision for W3C #119 #118 #138
• The hyperlinks to EWP in section 4 are substantively OK, but editorially suboptimal. These statements are understandable (in their intended meaning) without reference to EWP, but EWP has relevant things to say about them for those who would like to know more. The current hyperlinks might suggest you need to read EWP for definitions, but I don't think it's true, and I think it would be good to recast them more explicitly as "see also […]"
• I'm not a huge fan of how the acknowledgement section is written in general, but the mention of EWP there doesn't seem especially problematic.

[dwsinger]

My preference is that W3C have a set of statements and documents that clearly develop a story.

• as a foundation, our one-line mission statement (currently the full potential one);
• then our over-arching vision statement; short, punchy, laying out our stance and approach;
• then documents that apply that to specific areas, or develop the ideas more fully
  • Web Platform Design Principles
  • Privacy Principles
  • Ethical Web Principles
  • Principles for international support and inclusion (i18n)
  • Principles for varied ability support and inclusion (accessibility)
  • …
• then specifications, notes, and so on, that apply these principles or use them in specific areas

It's true, some of these pre-date the over-arching vision document. I don't think that's a good reason to cite them here, though. They do need to be congruent, and indeed we should strive for community support down the stack. And we should document the stack too, somewhere closely associated with the vision.

[jyasskin]

I think this issue is obsolete, since the EWP is farther along on the Statement track than the Vision.