I was initially excited about being a part of the HTML Working Group. I felt subscribing to the mailing list would offer an opportunity to contribute to the development of the HTML5 recommendation, or at the very least provide some insight into the process. So far, I have gained a bit of insight into the process. It’s that there really isn’t one.
The amount of email that the list generates is completely unmanageable. A weekend can generate about 150 emails. And most of those emails are quite lengthy. There’s currently no real structure of what discussions should take place or how they should be handled. Actually, so far one quarter of the discussions have been about that fact. People trying to come up with a process. If you count all the discussions about how to handle the previous WHATWG efforts and how the new discussions will interplay with those, then it’s probably more like one third. I would have figured most of this would have been ironed out before setting up the new working group, but it hasn’t. The rest of the discussions are people pitching what they would and would not like to see in HTML5 and the ensuing arguments debate. Which is how it should be, but right now everything is posted very “willy-nilly”.
I’m sure most of these issues will resolve themselves in due time and real work will begin to get done (there’s some very smart people on this list). But unless you make the HTML WG your primary effort and don’t have a day job or a family, I’m not sure how anyone could actively participate. So I’ve unsubscribed from the mailing list. I’ll probably still keep tabs through the blog and the mailing lists online archives, but unsubscribing will remove the unnecessary “select unread, mark as read” workflow I currently have with dealing with the list.
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