Re: HTML5-warnings - motivations (was: HTML5-warnings - request to publish as next heartbeat WD)

You and Ian are questioning my motives for asking for the HTML5-warnings
document to be published as a WD. Rather than let you assert what my
intentions are, we should address these dubious claims head on:

Ian Hickson wrote:
>> html5-warnings-diff.html#microdata
>
>Here I think we see the real reason you are doing this.
...
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> It seems to me the idea of the draft is to deliver
> html5-warnings-diff.html#microdata

Both of you are out of line.

You are also flat out wrong. It is no surprise that the HTML5
specification doesn't have more editors if even warnings about spec
language is met with these types of accusations. You undermine the HTML5
effort by doing so.

I edited the HTML5-warnings draft because I believe that when the W3C
publishes a document to the public that is controversial, it should
attempt to communicate which parts of that document are problematic. It
should be done in a way that is not overly broad, but specific to key
sections. I worry more about HTML5's success in the marketplace than I
do about RDFa's success in the marketplace.

However, I understand that nothing I say will change your or Ian's false
perspective. I believe that my actions will speak for themselves over
time and you will eventually realize that we're in this together and
that I am extending a helping hand.

Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> Basically we have Ian's HTML5 proposal (A) and we have the
>> HTML5-warnings proposal (A+B). Since HTML5-warnings is just Ian's
>> proposal with a bunch of warnings, it seems sort of redundant to publish
>> both proposals since by publishing HTML5-warnings, we publish Ian's
>> proposal by inclusion.
> 
> If someone wanted to edit http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/ to include a
> warning stating that the spec is not applicable to text/html, and that
> HTML 5 specifies microdata which addresses the use case space of RDFa
> with a simpler processing model, without a variant of the
> qnames-in-content pattern, without prefix-based indirection and without
> requiring (while allowing) the use of URIs as identifiers, would you be
> OK with such an edit if the resulting document still contained what's
> currently in rdfa-syntax by inclusion?

Personally, I would welcome that type of proposal in the RDFa community.
I don't think that others would, but since your question is directed at
me, I will answer from my perspective.

It is important to have competition in the standards process. Having
Microdata and RDFa compete for mind-share is an important part of the
long-term health of of the Web. Being able to measure the competition
(in some way) at points along the maturation of both proposals is vital
for both efforts. Polls are one mechanism that can be used to get
feedback, implementations are another.

If what you are proposing is to alter the RDFa syntax document with the
changes you mentioned above, effectively making it into the Microdata
specification and calling for a formal poll/vote in the SWD WG and
XHTML2 WG, then by all means, please do that if you think that is the
most effective way of moving Microdata forward. I think you will meet a
great deal of opposition, but I could be wrong and the only way to find
out is if you do it and there is a poll on the issue.

If what you are proposing is that I would take great offense if you
proposed changes to the RDFa Syntax document by marking those changes
and then calling for a vote in SWD WG or XHTML2 WG -- I wouldn't. The
RDFa TF welcomes input, especially dissenting input, and we really
should have a poll to see what the current preferred mechanism is for
the various communities.

There is not a problem with proposing language and having a poll to
receive feedback from the community -- that's what I'm doing. I'd like
to see if what some are asserting (that the community believes that some
of the issues I outline in the HTML5-warnings draft are not worth
mentioning) are true.

I have proposed a compromise poll option to do so: If voters would like
to not have certain controversial language included, they may specify
exactly which sections they do not want to be included in the poll.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny) (twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.1 Released - Browser-based P2P Commerce
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/06/29/browser-based-p2p-commerce/

Received on Monday, 10 August 2009 15:23:22 UTC