Give a sensical reading for "Be timeless enough" #167 #181
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I think I see where you are going with this improvement, and there is a subtle de-duplication that your edit is doing (good), which I have added a suggested edit to this PR to really make clear (and keep the "guide W3C" part explicitly in the prior point).
I also suggest retaining the flexible/evolve wording as such positive guidance tends to be more effective than negative avoidance guidance.
Vision/Vision.bs
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| * Communicate shared values and principles of the W3C community | |||
| * Be opinionated enough to provide a framework for making decisions, | |||
| particularly on controversial issues | |||
| * Be timeless enough to guide W3C yet flexible enough to evolve when needed | |||
| * Be timeless enough to remain meaningful without needing frequent revision | |||
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| * Be timeless enough to remain meaningful without needing frequent revision | |
| * Be timeless enough to remain meaningful yet flexible enough to evolve when needed |
I tend to prefer emphasizing the positive (flexible, evolve) rather than negative (without, frequent) so I'd like to retain that part of the clause.
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I understand your point about positive framing, but I don't think "timeless" and "flexible to evolve" are compatible. Timeless means it doesn't need to change, because it remains relevant over time, not needing change even as things change around it.
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(Switched "meaningful" to "relevant", but don't have any ideas about the "without needing frequent revision" part that conveys the same idea.)
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It's about balancing timeless and flexible, which is achieved by the "yet" joiner of those two clauses.
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Yeah, I get what you're hoping it means, but don't think that edit you have there actually works though.
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Vision/Vision.bs
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| particularly on controversial issues | ||
| * Be timeless enough to guide W3C yet flexible enough to evolve when needed | ||
| * Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision |
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| * Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision | |
| * Be timeless enough to remain dependable yet flexible enough to evolve when needed |
Since we're now wordsmithing (which I'd really like to avoid any more of), another suggestion is "dependable" which feels more positive and affirming than "relevant", and is something associated with being "timeless".
"yet" helps bridge the two clauses and the intent here is to show a desire to balance seemingly but not necessarily opposing goals of timelessness and evolution, "stable" vs "living" etc.
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no strong view on relevant vs dependable.
For the second half of the sentence, I wonder if the problem is comes from "timeless" being a quality of the content of document, while "flexible" being rather a property of the way we maintain it. In other words, if we did have a commitment to maintain the document and evolve it as needed, could we make the document itself inflexible, defeating that intent to maintain?
This makes me think that the original ("without needing…") may be closer to what we need.
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Fixing the STOD might be a better solution to this:
- It will continue to evolve, and the AB will issue updates as often as needed.
+ It will continue to evolve and the AB will issue updates as needed,
+ though such updates are not expected to be frequent.(together with keeping the "Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision" phrasing in the document itself)
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I don't believe so. It was good enough for Ethical Web Principles:
It will continue to evolve and the TAG will issue updates as often as needed.
in https://w3ctag.github.io/ethical-web-principles/ to go to Statement so I'd rather keep our own wording the same without a very good reason to diverge.
tantek
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For background, the original text for that sentence (which is "[…] timeless enough that it doesn't need frequent revision.") is something I wrote, along with the other bullets in that section, for a proposed charter https://florian.rivoal.net/ab/2023/vision-charter/ for the Vision Task Force, and which got adopted via a resolution of the Vision TF (#22 (comment)). The original intent of these bullets was to give us (high level) success criteria to judge the document and evaluate whether we had done a good enough job of it. I believe that in their migration to the "Purpose of this document", they still serve the same goal. If you look at the other criteria, these are things we can evaluate the document against.
The original sentence too served this purpose: If the document doesn't have a timeless feel, we need to rework it to remove parts that are anchored in or referring to ephemeral things. Back in March, @tantek did a number of clean-up and refactoring changes, meant to be editorial and thus without needing group consensus, to get us to the point where the Vision was publishable, which these changes did by and large accomplish. One of these changes included changing this sentence, in a way that I think is not editorial and does it a disservice, because it no longer fulfills its original goal: The introduction of the notion of flexibility in that sentence doesn't work as an evaluation criteria like the others. I cannot read the document and judge whether there's enough flexibility in it, or if we should add more, or whether flexibility would be obtained by removing something. Words are malleable, and we can always change them if we have the will to do so. Flexibility is not a property of the text, but of those working on it. So, even though I agree that being flexible to evolve in response to needs is a desirable attribute of the body of people who will maintain that work, I don't think it makes sense to call it out as a goal for the work artifact itself. The variant of the sentence that @tantek is proposing in this PR is a strict improvement over the one that has been in the vision since March, and it restores some of the original sentence's meaning. So I would definitely prefer adopting it to leaving the text as is. However, it still keeps this notion of flexibility, which again, is a good point to bring up about how people should treat the document, but IMO not applicable to that particular sentence / list which is about the text of the document itself. I would prefer just reverting (and possibly talk about flexibility elsewhere, such as the status of this document, as that section discusses the people who work on the vision). |
Vision/Vision.bs
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| particularly on controversial issues | ||
| * Be timeless enough to guide W3C yet flexible enough to evolve when needed | ||
| * Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision |
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| * Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision | |
| * Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision, but evolve based on the needs of the community. |
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(or possibly "be ready to evolve...".
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Thanks @cwilso. This is not exactly what I had in mind, but this (or the "be ready to evolve" variant) may be a reasonable compromise. I still find it a little off that it's in that section, but there's enough of a conceptual separation that it no longer hinders the original message.
I could live with this.
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Committed
Be timeless enough to remain relevant without needing frequent revision,
while being open to evolution based on the needs of the community
@cwilso Does that seem to capture what you're aiming for?
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Yes, although I would keep the verb "evolve" rather than the noun "evolution" to 1) mirror the verb "remain" in the first clause, and 2) avoid being mistaken for "revolution".
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OK. Changed to "evolving", though, because afaict "evolve" is the wrong tense there...
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My only remaining nit on this PR at this point is the additional length being added (I've been trying to simplify & reduce the size/length of the Vision), however there are sufficient meaningful improvements in this PR (as well as a broadening consensus) that I'd rather land it, and then separately try to continue simplifying and reducing the overall size.
Addresses the second point in #167:
By replacing with
which is closer to the original version. Open to other ideas; just don't think the current text particularly makes sense or reflects the original meaning of this bullet point (which was about timelessness meaning it can endure without revision without becoming stale).
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