Re: adding a note to 4.3.10.1 Creating an outline

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, 2014-02-25 15:49 +0000:
>
>> Section 4.3.10.1 Creating an outline [1] defines an outlining algorithm,
>> but there are no implementation requirements for user agents.
>
> True but there are nonetheless requirements, and other implementations of
> the requirements. So it's clear at least that the algorithm is implementable.
>
> For the UA case what's lacking at this point is any requirement for how UAs
> must expose it.
>
> However, there is already a JavaScript library that follows the spec to
> provide an "HTML5Outline(element)" method that returns an outline object
> for a subtree or whole document -- depending on what element you give it --
> (and as a bonus an outline.asHTML convenience method to generate an HTML
> representation of an outline) -
>
>   https://code.google.com/p/h5o/
>
> So I'd like for the spec to actually explicitly define something like that
> HTML5Outline(element) method, or an element.createOutline or whatever name.
> But so far Hixie's not been keen on adding such a createOutline method to
> the spec, and nobody else has yet specced anything for it. So here we are.
>

A year ago, it was clear that the h5o script (and gsnedder's outliner
[1]) interpreted the outline algorithm differently from how the w3c's
dev validator did [2]. Unless something's changed, I'm assuming that
things are much the same and the correct interpretation of the
algorithm (as it was intended) remains ambiguous. As such, I think
explicitly defining a formal method for doing so is a good idea, and
gets my vote.

[1] http://gsnedders.html5.org/outliner/
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2013Apr/0003.html


Jason

Received on Friday, 28 February 2014 00:50:17 UTC