Re[2]: XHTML 2.0 and Semantics

Hello everyone,

> At 17:09 -0500 2003-01-13, ed nixon wrote:
>>Mr. Dubost, Why would you post this profanity riddled piece of 
>>self-indulgence to a public mailing list?

> - About Mark
> No profanity at all. The role of W3C is to reach the consensus inside 
> the WG. The comments of the public must be addressed and the W3C Team 
> or people inside WG are not in an ivory tower. It's why comments of 
> the public are always interesting even if they do not please a part 
> of the community.
Interesting point. Following your logic, which comments are
uninteresting? Who is the judge here? I ask because I saw a great
number of letters which were never addressed. Perhaps these were
"uninteresting", huh?

> I have noticed like you that the tone of Mark Pilgrim was a bit 
> angry. We are here to have a dialog and a discussion. I will not 
> adopt the position of the ostrich (put our head in the sand) and 
> ignore comments even if they are not favorable. The role of W3C is 
> not to enforce but to find a solution which leads to interoperability.
Mark was angry because he didn't know what he wanted. He finally stuck
to HTML 4, and that's great. No one was *forcing* him to move to XHTML
1.1, because in the end all the W3C produces are recommendations,
not laws. He also misinterpreted the WAI guideline 11.1 [1]. Mark
thought if he uses the W3C technologies he immediately goes into
ecstasies. When it didn't happen he bursted out writing essays on
"funky markup" [2].

> Evolution means that sometimes you have to drop features and 
> sometimes you have to keep some.
Features were kept at least three times: from HTML 3.2 to HTML 4.01,
XHTML 1.0, and XHTML 1.1. It's like from monkey to a very large
monkey, to a hairless monkey, and to a orthograde monkey. It's the
time to introduce a smart monkey (aka a man). XHTML 2 in our case. :)

> Not so many people know the process
> of W3C even if the document is widely accessible.
The sad thing is that a lot of people have read the document, but
honestly, Karl, are you sure all the W3C folks have also read it?
If you're not at the W3C it means no matter what letters you
write and no matter how many. Most of them are simply ignored.
Not "half-answered", not "forgotten", just ignored. I really
understand why Mark doesn't write to www-html, for example.

> And it's why I have
> invited Mark to send his comments to the list.

> *Topic Mark Pilgrim closed*

> *Topic XHTML open*

> in the QA Specification Guidelines (which is a WORKING DRAFT too), we 
> recommend in the guideline 7. Identify the relation between 
> deprecated features and conformance.

> See http://www.w3.org/QA/WG/2002/12/qaframe-spec-20021220#b2ab3d293

> with the following checkpoints

> 7.1 Identify each deprecated feature. [Priority 1]
> 7.2 For each class of product, specify the degree of
>      support required for each deprecated feature and
>      the conformance consequences of the deprecation. [Priority 1]
> 7.3 Include an explanation for the deprecation. [Priority 3]
> 7.4 Include examples to illustrate how to avoid
>      using deprecated features. [Priority 3]

> I will review with my QA and Conformance hat the XHTML 2.0 WD when it 
> will be close to the Last Call Stage to recommend the HTML WG to 
> declare every choices like against the QA Spec Guidelines.

> I remind to the people that it's really important to send your 
> reviews and comments to the www-html list if you want to raise your 
> voice.
I agree it's important. However it's also important to actually
respond to those letters.

Links: [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/#gl-use-w3c
       [2] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/13.html#semantic_obsolescence
---
  Alexander "Croll" Savenkov                  http://www.thecroll.com/
  w3@hotbox.ru                                     http://croll.da.ru/

Received on Tuesday, 14 January 2003 10:38:54 UTC