Subject: Date moratorium next steps

From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2004 14:31:10 -0700

Greetings again. Thank you for (mostly) adhering to the moratorium on 
discussing dates. Hopefully, all of you spent some of this time 
thinking about what you want and what you really need from dates. (If 
not, stop reading this, wander around the room a bit, and think.)

The next phase of the Great Date Debate will consist of the following:

- If you have a good idea of what you need (not want), please write a 
new pace with a proposal for text for the document. The title of the 
pace *must* be "PaceDateXyx", where Xyz is a string that indicates 
one of your names. The purpose of the naming rule is to prevent 
"PaceDateSimple" or "PaceDateComplete" or 
"PaceDatePublishingIndustry" and so on.

- All elements and/or attributes in each pace *must* have names made 
up of single lower-case characters, such as "atom:a", "atom:g", and 
so on. The purpose of the element/attribute naming rule is to force 
all readers to read the semantics in the pace. The long debate on 
this list has shown that people (quite naturally) think they know 
what is in an element by its name; it is unlikely that any one pace 
will need more than 26 names.

- The moratorium on list discussion continues until next Wednesday. 
At that time, all discussion about dates *must* be about these 
specific paces. Before Wednesday, do *not* post that "I added a pace" 
or "Jim's pace looks good" and so on. The purpose of the moratorium 
extension is to give equal weight to all the proposals, and not to 
give quick pace-writers the advantage; this is a classic 
brainstorming technique.

- Starting next Wednesday, we talk for a while. If people start to 
converge, great. If not, polls and so on will happen. The purpose of 
this is to find consensus.

- After we pick one, the pace writer proposes the actual names for 
the elements and/or attributes and we discuss those on the list. This 
will hopefully be easy. The purpose of this is to help the document 
authors.

- We find some other thorny issue.

--Paul