Re: Rethinking HTML 5 (Was: Re: Semicolon after entities)

On Tue, May 1, 2007 11:41 am, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On May 1, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Shane McCarron wrote:
>> Perhaps if those implementation conformance constraints were
>> defined in a separate specification, it would help to clearly
>> divide the issue?  In the case of XHTML 2 the plan was always to
>> have an implementors guide that went along with it to provide the
>> sort of information I think you are talking about; but without
>> confusing the authoring community with a lot of data that, frankly,
>> is very domain specific.
>
> I think it's a mistake to consider document conformance requirements
> to be general-purpose and user agent conformance requirements to be
> "domain specific". First, it is essential that the two match up when
> they overlap. Second, authors generally learn the language from
> secondary sources, such as books, articles, tutorials, reference
> guides, classes and examples. But none of those things exist for
> implementors. So leaving out user agent conformance requirements to
> make it easier for authors to read the spec is a bad tradeoff.

Why not develop the standard as one document with the assumption that when
finalized it will be split into separate documents for Content Authors and
Implementors?

-Matt

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 19:45:32 UTC