Include the whole priority of constituencies

[jyasskin]

https://www.w3.org/TR/w3c-vision/#user-first has

User-first: We put the needs of users first: above authors, publishers, implementers, paying W3C Members, or theoretical purity.

This list of constituencies comes from the Priority of Constituencies, originally at https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies, and now at https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies

User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

The Vision should include the whole ordering, not just the fact that users are at the top.

The current Vision adds "paying W3C Members", which is appropriate for a vision for the W3C, and it appropriately doesn't say that they get any special privileges beyond their other roles in the priority. The fix for this issue should maintain those properties.

This interacts with #211, which asks if "users" is the right term at all. "People" (or "individuals" if you want to explicitly exclude corporations) is an obvious replacement, but unfortunately, people can act in any of the roles. We need to keep a term that focuses on the people who visit web pages and don't have any particular technical skills.

[cwilso]

I would note this was intentional, and there are several other intentional changes from the design principles: the explicit addition of publishers (because publishers are not just a class of "author") and "paying W3C members" (to denote that we are not giving extra credibility to Members simply because they are Members), and the removal of specification writers being explicitly mentioned (because that point was less important than brevity than those present - since from a visionary perspective, they're more related to implementers, though somewhat different when designing features).

[jyasskin]

If it's a good idea to add publishers here, I think it's also a good idea to update the Design Principles: w3ctag/design-principles#535. I think it'd be non-ideal to have that aspect diverge between the Vision and the Principles.

I think it's fine to omit Specifiers here. I also agree with mentioning W3C members, but I'd mention them as "W3C Members are placed in the priority as members of the other groups." instead of just adding them to the list.

Can you elaborate on the reasons to avoid including the full ordering?

[cwilso]

(after a chat with @jyasskin)

It seems like the primary challenge here is that the Vision doc does not explicitly order the constituencies, other than saying "users come first"; the DP do. (I originally read this issue as being primarily about the fact that the Vision explicitly mentions publishers and paying W3C members, and does not mention specification writers.)

I can take a stab at explicitly ordering as the DP do, and moving the point about paying members to a separate clause.

[jyasskin]

[In my head, because I took too much math, a total ordering is a set of pairwise relationships, so {users>authors, users>implementers, users>purity} is a proper subset of users>authors>implementers>purity. Sorry that my title failed to express that to most other humans. 🙃]

[martinthomson]

The TAG believes that the main source of conflict here is any attempt to reformulate this statement, which puts the AB and TAG into an unnecessary conflict in terms of who owns the priority of constituencies.

It would be best if there is a single formulation of this important principle.

If there is a place for publishers, we should discuss that in the context of the design principles.

We also discussed the role of W3C members and it makes sense for this document to clarify that "W3C member" has no inherent ordering, as below.

Hence, we suggest:

Put users first: W3C prioritizes the interests of various stakeholders according to the priority of constituencies.
W3C members are not listed in that ordering; they assume a position in the ordering according to the role they act in.

[chaals]

+1

[cwilso]

I would prefer an even simpler reduction, then:

User-first: W3C prioritizes the needs of users before other constituencies, including those of W3C Members.

(I'm not a fan of adding a dependency on yet another document, and certainly not via reference to a github repo rather than a Statement.)