Re: XSF Process Change Proposals

Stephen Paul Weber <[email protected]> Thu, 14 May 2026 22:22:53 -0500
Newsgroups	gmane.network.jabber.standards-jig
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
>Having read what Dave and Matthew wrote, I think the best proposal would be to
>not assign numbers to Experimental XEPs, but just a short name and publish
>them under that short name (we alresdy assign short names to XEPs so that
>should be a cheap one).
>I'd also rename Experimental to Draft (or better: XMPP-Draft). Experimental
>sounds more like "XEP ready, experimenting with implementations" rather than
>"this is a draft we are working on".

I don't mind this, but I do think there can be a use for an Experimental in 
between "early draft" and "previously draft now stable".

I would honestly suggest we use a dedicated section of the wiki to lower the 
bar on "early draft" further. Other spec authoring groups have had good luck 
with this in the past. Rather than getting council or editor involved or 
making anyone push any buttons, just write stuff and collaborate (under the 
IPR policy, sure) and when it's "ready" then submit for eyes, votes, 
process, numbering, namespace versioning, etc. We can of course do this 
without using a wiki and still force everything through github, but it's 
more friction.

I'll say that, for myself as an implementor, when I want to do something my 
first stop is always to find every XEP I can that is remotely related 
sounding or looking, read them all, and bake that into my brain to try to 
see how what I want to do could be accomplished using existing specs.  
Sometimes I miss one, but I don't check the status when I do this.  Deferred 
is where all the good XEPs are after all, and why would I write a new spec 
for something just because the last attempt is languishing?

Now maybe I'm doing it wrong and I should ignore Experimental/Deferred, but 
then I would have ended up starting from scratch on several more things.  
Maybe that would have been better, but I'm not sure. However you can see how 
this contributes to wanting stuff in the XEP pool to be at least indicative 
of "this is maybe a good idea" as an implementor vs "this is a document that 
says things".

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