Re: Splitting up the spec

On Mon, 24 Nov 2008, Toby A Inkster wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> > Should the Oxford English Dictionary be split into "common words" and 
> > "uncommon words"? How is that different?
> 
> Actually, it is. There is a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which, 
> despite the name is still two very hefty volumes) containing all the 
> common words, and the full Oxford English Dictionary containing pretty 
> much all the English words which have been uttered by anyone at any 
> point in history. (Though the former contains a subset of the words of 
> the latter: they are not disjoint.)

I don't mind us having filtered views of the spec. That's similar to what 
the OED does. But there's no version of the OED that _excludes_ the common 
words, and that's what I'm objecting to doing with HTML5.


> It's not a matter of separating out what's common and what's not common.

That has been suggested.


> It's a matter of separating out the markup language (HTML), its API 
> (DOM) and scripting environment features (SQL, storage, history, etc). 
> Something like Javascript-accessible SQL has nothing to do with the 
> HTML5 markup language per se - it just so happens that many people will 
> use them together. As proof: I don't imagine that many browsers will 
> prevent SQL API being used by HTML4 pages or XHTML2 pages. Some may also 
> allow SVG and MathML to use it.

I agree that the local storage section can and should be eventually moved 
to its own separated document. I disagree that this extends to the 
majority of the document (in fact only storage and WebSocket seem to be 
independent enough).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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