Re: html4 vs html5 and "superseded RECs" when there isn't a new REC

Note - this is ISSUE-2 - if you add that string in mails about the topic  
they will be collected at  
http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/2

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:48:35 +0100, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 7 March 2012 at 10:35, Carr, Wayne wrote:
>> With HTML4 we have the formal W3C Recommendation for HTML, but no one  
>> would want that as the basis for a UA. It has been superseded by HTML5.  
>> But, people still write that html4 is the html spec and html5 is in the  
>> future. Obviously, that doesn’t reflect the Web Browsers out there  
>> which have embraced html5. But html5 is still years away from going to  
>> REC.
>>
>> It seems in this (hopefully) unusual situation,
>
> Just wondering, was it not the same case with CSS 2.1 (and now with many  
> modules of CSS3)? And with XHR 1 and XHR level 2 also (with neither XHR  
> version going to REC, while XHR 1 was abandoned in favour of just "XHR"…)

Yeah, I think the situation is actually quite common.

> XHR level 2 was originally published under:
> http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest2/
...
> What would be nice would be if HTML5 would dethrone the obsolete XHTML  
> spec from the URI (and we dropped the "5" from the spec, as the WHATWG  
> has done):
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html/

Actually, I think that is a far too simplistic approach to be useful,  
except to a small handful of the stakeholders. And I think removing the  
version token from the spec is not a helpful solution, as nice as it might  
feel.

Having a pointer that describes the status of HTML at  
http://www.w3.org/TR/html/ might be useful - and it might need to be more  
complex than "latest draft, last 'heartbeat' publication, last  
Recommendation". There are plenty of people who use XHTML. There are  
people who use HTML 4. There are people who use HTML5. And there are  
people who use HTML and don't actually know what they are using. If they  
want to look up "What is HTML" and they expect W3C (instead of Wikipedia,  
about.com, or their local library's CD-ROM encyclopedia of the Web) to  
explain it, we should think about how to provide different bookmarkable  
references for the different needs.

(Which also feeds into the bibliographic references discussion Marcos  
kicked off a while ago. Did that result in any issues, actions, or  
conclusions?)

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2012 11:09:36 UTC