Re: Suggested revised text for HTML/XML report intro

Hi all,

On Aug 16, 2011, at 04:35 , Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
> Hmm. First of all, I certainly would be glad to find out that XML5 could "work", and be widely accepted; it's just the sort of direction I was hoping the task force would find to be practical. That said, I thought we had discussed it some, and that the reason we weren't advocating it more directly was a sense that the XML community would not adopt things along those lines.
> 
> If that conclusion on my part is premature, all the better, but then I have to ask why the task force isn't continuing to investigate that direction a bit more thoroughly. Like Larry (or at least if I understand Larry correctly), I had hopes originally that the task force would uncover approaches that would bring the technology stacks closer than they are today. If we think that approaches like XML5 are at least promising, then it seems that the task force should try and dig deeper, or at least advocate such investigations as a next step for others to pursue.

I think that there are several things I'd like to note here. The first is that I don't think that the TF has really reached consensus on a conclusion or next steps, and I agree with Anne that it's premature to try to announce a result. I'm not entirely convinced that we have a clear indication that the XML community would not adopt something like XML5 (whatever it ends up looking like). It has not created wild agitation (which I'm not surprised about — I suspect there's a fair amount of specification fatigue going on in the XML community; also many who would feel the impact of such a change are no longer in the community since they use XML as matter-of-fact plumbing). It also has no created wild rejection. There have been some interesting proposals here and there but they've stayed at that level. Until such a time as someone decides to seriously take the lead in an XML5 experimentation I think that it's unlikely that we'll know whether it could work or not, or whether there's real world demand or not.

The other thing is that I don't think that "XML5: yes or no" is the only useful output for this TF. I could certainly see an outcome in which we find no compelling reason or demand to unify HTML5 and XML at the parsing level, but where we do see value in making the two universes cross-pollinate more. This could be through a series of small changes here and there to either ecosystem that would promote integration rather than unification. From http://www.w3.org/mid/2C571BE6-CB4A-4079-A3EA-51FF1158D161@berjon.com:


"""
Beyond that, I think that there are two areas in which we can make recommendations, and perhaps investigate solutions:

   • Points of friction easily removed, e.g. producing HTML5 from XSLT (including 1.0). This list is likely quite short, the use cases rather obvious, and the solutions quite simple.

   • Good ideas that exist in one environment but not in the other so that we may get cross-pollination, e.g. http://simonstl.com/articles/cssFragID.html (yes I'm counting CSS and much of the browser stack as part of "HTML5", and I don't much care if people mind :). This list can get wilder (a Javascript/CSS/whatever-based variant of XSLT — remember http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-STTS3? — binary HTML5, Selector axes that could be used with the Selector API but not in CSS (for performance reasons)) and I doubt that this group can provide solutions directly but we can at least get the discussion going. My reason for including this discussion here is because a lot of people complain that HTML5 is too browser oriented and doesn't address their non-browser needs, but that is something that can only be addressed through direct contribution to the production [of] technology that would take care of those other needs. It seems to me that that's a message which this group could perhaps help spread.
"""

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 14:27:43 UTC