Terminology: "Non-goals" meaning

[matatk]

Does "Non-goals" mean the same thing as "out of scope" or is it more about stating what is the opposite of the goals of a proposal (or, other)?

[martinthomson]

To my reading, a non-goal is not declaring something out of scope necessarily. A non-goal might be a goal that is not sought, but might be achieved anyway. For instance, if it was not a goal to provide the ability to improve accessibility through the development of a given CSS feature, if someone figures out how to do that, the design might still be acceptable.

That said, in a lot of cases, things listed as non-goals are concretely anti-goals, or things that something must not do.

That imprecision is sometimes intentional. We should be careful to allow that, because sometimes that is necessary to gain consensus around text. That's a latent conflict that is deferred, which can be good: sometimes you don't need to resolve that conflict because it never comes up. Or, the conflict, when it happens, occurs when you have more information about the various positions and are in a better position to make a good decision.