- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:30:27 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Cc: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>, uri@w3.org
On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Tim Bray wrote: > > Also, I'm not enthusiastic about writing standards unless there's an > obvious pain point that needs to be addressed. If the implementors are > in general doing the right thing in a compatible way, is any further > spec work required? Unfortunately the UAs aren't all doing exactly the same thing, they're just all in the same ballpark. So precise rules would help. In general, anything that means that a user agent could be written in an interoperable way without examining other user agents is a good thing. Historically, writing a Web browser has involved at least as much reverse engineering of other browsers as it has examining the specs, which is a very poor state for the standards community to be in. Our job should be to make it possible to implement Web-ready software in a clean room, not to describe a set of ideals and leave the hard work to the implementors. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2008 19:31:02 UTC