Null change proposal for ISSUE-41

ISSUE-41
========

SUMMARY
There is no problem and the proposed remedy is to change nothing.

RATIONALE
"Decentralized extensibility" is not a problem description.

The issue description says that "The HTML5 specification does not have a 
mechanism to allow decentralized parties to create their own languages, 
typically XML languages, and exchange them in HTML5 text/html 
serializations", but to all appearances this is a good thing, not a 
problem. Why would we want to encourage vendors to create proprietary 
languages and exchange them as text/html? The whole point of having a 
standard is that people shouldn't do that.

Another change proposal suggests a convention should be provided for 
preventing vendor-specific non-standard extensions from clashing with 
themselves and future standard development. This is a real problem, but it 
is inappropriate to address this problem via the change proposal process 
since it corresponds to an open bug and does not have any bearing on the 
topic given by the issue description (as quoted above): such non-standard 
extensions would by definition not be "allowed"; they would merely be 
handled by the provision of a convention for experimentation in non- 
validating documents (as, for instance, with CSS vendor prefixes).

DETAILS
Change nothing.

IMPACT

POSITIVE EFFECTS
By not providing solutions without corresponding problems, we avoid the 
danger of designing solutions that do not address any real problems. We 
also avoid encouraging people to use these solutions to address problems 
that either should not be addressed at all, or to address problems that 
should be addressed in other ways that are far more appropriate.

NEGATIVE EFFECTS
None.

CONFORMANCE CLASS CHANGES
None.

RISKS
None. We can always add further extension mechanisms later if an actual 
problem is found to exist after all.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2010 06:57:33 UTC