Re: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

Ian Hickson wrote:
> ...
> Indeed, and <canvas>, another good example of why it is really bad for 
> people to go and invent their own elements without working with the wider 
> community. We're _still_ dealing with the problems Apple caused with 
> <canvas>, for example the lack of a Path object, which we could have 
> avoided if they had had wider peer review before shipping.
> ...

<canvas> was developed without distributed extensibility in the 
language, wasn't it?

Anyway, whether a new element or a whole new vocabulary will be good 
IMHO does not depend whether an extension point is there. If it isn't, 
people do it anyway (canvas) or try strange workarounds (like putting 
data into class attributes, see latest Microformat community extensions 
about the abbr/time problem).

What distributed extensibility gives us is disambiguation. But that 
doesn't mean that things won't get peer review.

And yes, I talk from experience. For instance, WebDAV uses URI-based 
extensibility all over the place, but most extensions I'm aware of 
happen within the IETF process anyway.

> ...

BR, Julian

Received on Friday, 1 August 2008 11:51:22 UTC