Re: SURVEY: Release "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4" as a W3C Working Draft? formal decision

On Jul 5, 2007, at 8:38 AM, Dan Connolly wrote:

>
> On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 12:09 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>> [[
>> Shall we release HTML 5 differences from HTML 4 as a W3C Working  
>> Draft?
> [...]
>> See also results as they come in
>>  http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/trdiff/results
>
> Thanks to the 84 WG members who responded to the question.
> There is considerable support for the proposal, but not
> consensus.
>
> After some discussion with related groups (
> http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html#coordination )
> via the Hypertext Coordination Group about the heartbeat
> requirement, it seems a slip of a month or two is acceptable.
>
> The HTML WG co-chairs are persuaded by the argument that publishing
> this diff document before the design principles and the spec
> is somewhat backwards.

I don't understand this argument. The diff document is a factual  
document meant to aid review (both internal and external) and does  
not include any design decisions, it merely documents the state of  
the spec. How, then, can it depend on the design principles document?

> It seems better to release this
> differences document as a companion to the HTML 5 spec,
> and to work on design principles meanwhile.

I'm planning to work on the design principles document, however,  
based on the last time it was discussed, I think it will be much  
harder to achieve enough agreement on this document to have something  
that can be published. As far as I can tell, the remaining objections  
to the diffs document are primarily procedural and about whether it  
should be published before certain other things. But the objections  
to the design principles document were substantive and called for  
changes to the document in different directions.

Given this, I think trying to publish the design principles document  
first will lead to significantly missing the heartbeat requirement.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2007 20:56:46 UTC