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w3c / AB-public

Advisory Board repository for materials not meant to be restricted to W3C Members
https://w3c.github.io/AB-public/
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Include the whole priority of constituencies #216

Open jyasskin opened 4 days ago

jyasskin commented 4 days ago

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 commented 4 days ago

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).