A few weeks ago, the US Supreme Court threw out the case of a man suing to have the words "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. But they left unanswered the central question of whether having those words in the pledge is a violation of the separation of church and state. Their ruling was that the plaintiff didn't have the right to bring the suit in the first place. That left a lot of people feeling like they'd come for dinner and left with a potato chip. But it illustrated a wise principle of decision making: don't waste time on decisions that you don't have to make.

When a proposal is raised on the AtomPub WG mailing list, sometimes we spend a lot of time debating the issues that we care about, only to discover that less charged issues make all that discussion unnecessary.

Here's an example of how this might happen. The other day, I wrote a proposal that would let us create a "Person construct" (with, for example, a person's name, email address, website URL, etc.) in one part of a feed, and then refer to it from other parts of the feed like this: <author ref="qwerty" />. One of the questions that arose over the proposal was whether the reference should look like <author ref="qwerty" />, <author href="#qwerty" />, or <author xlink:href="#qwerty" />. I imagine we'll resolve that issue when the proposal officially comes up for discussion. The point I want to make is that if we eventually decide to throw the proposal out, then it won't matter whether the attribute was named ref, href, or xlink:href, nor whether it begins with # or not.

Discussions can be far more efficient if the key issues are clearly spelled out in the beginning, and if they are addressed in an order that avoids discussion of things that may not matter depending on the answers to other questions.