Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> >
> > If you think it's obvious, maybe you would be willing to explain it to 
> > me?
> > 
> > The only interpretation that I can see is that Mike means 
> > non-normative text giving an introduction to the feature to help 
> > authors use it. That, however, is not a definition, and would in any 
> > case be inappropriate for obsolete features such as those being 
> > discussed here.
> 
> Defining what an element or attribute means isn't "informative"; it's an 
> essential part of specifying a vocabulary.

If by "defining" you mean text with no normative conformance criteria, 
that is untestable, and whose only purpose is to help authors work out 
what the feature is for, then no, that's an essential part of specifying a 
tutorial and is basically only fluff at the specification level. It's 
useful, important even, for features we want authors to use, but it has no 
use whatsoever for obsolete features that authors aren't allowed to use.


> Not doing so for obsolete features makes the spec incomplete (with 
> respect to those), and will get us back to the point where having the 
> mime type registration point to HTML5 only would be incorrect.

I disagree with that perspective.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 28 August 2009 08:22:05 UTC