Re: The harm that can come if the W3C supports publication of competing specs

On 1/17/10 5:14 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> That being said, and coming back to the main topic of *this* thread -
> here's a mail that may be relevant to the question how the HTML WG
> should treat Microdata:
>
> <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2010-January/046395.html>

This seems to me to be a fundamental problem with a lot of the things 
this working group is working on.  The lack of a sane way for 
implementors and authors to experiment means that the first users of a 
draft can effectively "lock in" whatever the spec is, warts, 
misfeatures, and all.

If those users happen to move before wide public review of the draft, 
this is a major problem.  Most of the HTML5 text hasn't so much received 
wide public review (e.g. I estimate that I've read maybe 10% of the text 
I probably need to review, and not through lack of trying on my part). 
So I would class most of it as not being acceptable to implement unless 
you're willing to change your implementation.  Certainly any 
implementation should be offering copious feedback on the spec in the 
process; for drafts at this early stage any implementation that happens 
without raising any questions at all is very suspect in my book.

-Boris

Received on Sunday, 17 January 2010 17:06:31 UTC