Re: Design Principles (from scratch)

Jonas Sicking On 09-05-26 01.03:
> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com> wrote:
>   
>> The W3C HTML working group is currently chartered:
>>
>>    http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html
>>
>> to produce one thing:
>>
>>  A language evolved from HTML4 for describing the semantics of
>>   documents and applications on the World Wide Web.
>>
>> I'm not sure how "from scratch" fits into this, as a basis
>> for any document in W3C, especially a "Design Principles"
>> document which purports to explain how the HTML4 language
>> "evolved" into the current specification.
>>     
>
> Personally I think the whole discussion about if HTML5 started from
> scratch or started from HTML4 is a red herring. The only point where
> I've heard the issue come up is in regards to if some features, like
> @summary and @profile, were "removed" or if they were "not added".
> Which seems like a to-may-to/to-mah-to discussion to me.
>   

If you love tomatoes but do not get any because you do not pronounce it 
right, then it matters.

> Can anybody show where it makes a difference how we arrived at the
> current HTML5 draft from hixie?
>   

Larry talked about how any extension of the language is blocked due to 
the writing style of Ian. As a matter of fact @profile is about 
extending the language. May be "cut off" is a better phrase than "from 
scratch".  I think that the HTML 4 + XHTML family of languages (because 
I begin to think that may be HTML 4 may be is more related to XHTML than 
to HTML 5, as thing develops) are extensible because they build on each 
others. It is really beyond me why why a more precisely defined language 
- implementation wise - has to cut off all extensibility. But perhaps it 
really is no wonder?

So it does matter how we see HTML 5 vis-a-vis HTML 4. It matters for the 
design.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 26 May 2009 02:50:18 UTC