[Responder] Jack Hobaugh
I object to Option A. On December 8, 2013, Roy Fielding notified the TPWG that an editorial change had been made to remove the “1” and “3” tracking values: “Over the past three weeks I have made a number of changes to the TPE editors' draft in order to remove the hard dependency on the Compliance specification and note the currently pending WG decisions. . . . . This reflects a first pass on revising TPE toward the new plan. Most of the changes are simply editorial rephrasing to avoid an indication of compliance. The non-editorial changes are summarized below. Note that these changes represent a set of proposals by the editor and are subject to the usual disclaimers regarding not yet being WG consensus. . . . . 5.2.* -- removed "1" and "3" tracking status values since they imply compliance; they can still be sent as qualifiers.” This issue appears to be an attempt to re-add the “1” and “3” values in a different place within the specification, i.e. in the qualifier field instead of the tracking property field. But hard-coding these values as qualifier field values then removes those values as values that may be used in a non-W3C compliance specification. Such a move would remove the intended flexibility of the qualifier field: “The meaning of each qualifier is presumed to be defined by one or more of the regimes listed in compliance.” Indeed if the “1” and “3” are already pre-defined in the TPE, these values would likely conflict with the use of these values in other compliance policies. Moreover, upon rejection of this proposal, the "1" and "3" values will still be available for use by a compliance document as is being recommended here if it is so desired by that compliance regime. In other words the qualifier field is reserved for the values defined by the compliance document. By hard-coding the 1 and 3 into the TPE, these values are taken off the board for further use. For example, maybe the compliance policy would want to use ‘1’ as a designator for the permitted use “frequency capping.” This value is no longer available if it has been hard-coded in the TPE.