Re: Versioning and HTML

On 19/4/09 10:30, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Apr 2009, Larry Masinter wrote:
>> Problem (from Chris Wilson): "the general problem with how we define
>> HTML today; if HTML5 becomes a Rec and we realize we did something
>> poorly we will cause rampant compatibility problems if we change
>> implementations. There are a whole bunch of versioning mechanism that
>> will address that but also cause their own problems."
>
> Isn't this the problem the Candidate Recommendation stage is supposed to
> address? Having serious CR phases, where we aim for two complete
> implementations of the entire specification (including all optional parts,
> and with no bugs, and with a comprehensive test suite written with the
> intent of finding every last edge case bug) seems like it would avoid the
> problem of doing things poorly, or at least reduce the likelihood to the
> point where it would be rare enough to not be enough to justify adding
> syntax-level support for routing around such problems later.

This would be nice. Can you suggest any inspirational precedents for a 
comparably-complex technology?

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/