- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 23:17:53 +0000 (UTC)
- To: John Allsopp <john@westciv.com>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Boris Zbarsky wrote: > > > > We are developing communications solutions for the timeframe of > > decades. > > While true, a solution that is always a decade away is not much use, > though. Also, while the solutions we're designing will almost certainly still be in use decades from now, and will almost certainly influence the solutions in use centuries from now, we are not actually designing the solutions for the problems seen decades from now. That is to say, we are trying to solve the problems of today and the next few years, with a design that will be extensible in the future by the maintainers of HTML once they know what the problems of the future are. HTML5 is not the end of the road; when HTML5 is widely deployed and used, then we will be able to design HTML6 on top of it. And so forth. Thus there is no need for HTML5 to have author-usable features for extensibility to solve the problems of decades from now. The extensibility mechanisms for authors (and HMTL5 has many [1]) should solve _today's_ problems; and the language should be designed in such a way that the future maintainers of HTML can later extend the language to fix their problems. This is just how HTML4 was done; it's how CSS was done; it's how XML was done (you can't invent new XML syntax, for instance, that would require a new version of XML). [1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#HTML5_should_support_a_way_for_anyone_to_invent_new_elements.21 -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 6 January 2009 23:18:31 UTC