Re: ACTION-78: Suggestion text for 1.5.4

On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Larry Masinter wrote:
> 
> My suggestion is that the entire section be removed from the 
> specification.  The current text is political and inflammatory, and does 
> not contribute to the understanding of the text:
>
>| This specification is independent of the various proprietary 
>| application languages that various vendors provide, but is intended to 
>| address many of the same problems.
>|
>| In contrast with proprietary languages, this specification is intended 
>| to define an openly-produced, vendor-neutral language, to be 
>| implemented in a broad range of competing products, across a wide range 
>| of platforms and devices. This enables developers to write applications 
>| that are not limited to one vendor's implementation or language. 
>| Furthermore, while writing applications that target vendor-specific 
>| platforms necessarily introduces a cost that application developers and 
>| their customers or users will face if they are forced to switch (or 
>| desire to switch) to another vendor's platform, using an 
>| openly-produced and vendor neutral language means that application 
>| authors can switch vendors with little to no cost.

I agree that the old text did have some unnecessarily inflammatory 
statements, but on Chris' advice, those were removed. What is political 
and inflammatory about the current text? It all seems objectively accurate 
to me. The reason for having this section at all is the same as all the 
other introduction sections -- people often ask why we are doing this and 
how this fits in with other solutions, and this is part of the answer.

Pretending that vendor-specific solutions don't exist won't make them go 
away. I don't understand why we would remove this section.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2009 21:03:43 UTC