Re: Cleaning House

On May 3, 2007, at 17:10, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) wrote:

> We're designing an HTML dialect for tomorrow, not for today.
> Forget what current editors do : think about what tomorrow's
> editors /could/ and /should/ do.

I thought we are supposed to define incremental improvements to HTML  
is such a way that the leading implementation of today can be  
gracefully updated to support the new features instead of requiring  
the existing implementations to be trashed.

Basically, we aren't here to legislate an unproven vision with the  
expectation that everyone would just abandon their current ways and  
magically conform to the unproven vision. We are here to make sure  
that different implementors improve the HTML capabilities of their  
existing products in an interoperable way. (As a by-product, we will  
be enabling new vendors to enter the market as well by making tacit  
knowledge explicit.)

> It's /really/ not difficult to explain to someone that a stretch
> of text is to be emboldened /for a reason/.

It doesn't follow that authors feel the need to make the reason  
explicit in the data format.

> But our challenge is to define HTML 5; leave the WYSIWYG editor  
> writers to worry their side of the problem and don't conflate only  
> marginally related issues.

Previously, you have shown what looked like hostility towards taking  
the browser vendor point of view as serious real-world constraints  
(http://www.w3.org/mid/46361DDB.4040203@Rhul.Ac.Uk). Now you seem to  
be willing to ignore the needs of the WYSIWYG editor writers. Who do  
you expect to implement your vision?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 15:26:43 UTC