Re: Thoughts on a new charter for HTML

Daniel B. Austin wrote:
>  After reading the briefing material, and looking at several previous charter
> documents,here are my thoughts ...

> (http://<http://www.w3.org/>www.w3.org/Style/XSL/Group/charter).
> I'll use this as a model for a 'strawman' proposal for

Excellent. Thanks for the contribution! It touches
all the bases.

My reservation with this proposal is: is it sufficiently
specific? It looks a bit like a blank check, ala "go away
and work for 18-24 months on making HTML better."

As a former WG chair, I know the value of a specific charter,
so that you can say "never mind about all that; it's not
in our charter anyway."

Let's put it this way: extensibility and scalability
are laudable goals, but they're also hard problems. I
think a lot of folks would bet against any random group of 20 people
who claimed to be solving these problems:
 
> · The extensibility problem  HTML, despite the immense effort devoted to its
> creation and specification, is currently lacking in the extensibility
> necessary
> to allow for rapidly changing web technology. This results in the misuse of
> current markup, the addition of proprietary markup, and a general lack of
> standardized results for web pages.
> · The scalability problem  HTML currently does not scale well across a diverse
> set of display devices, either those currently available (webTV,
> PalmPilots) or
> those expected in the future (cell phones, automobiles, home appliances). This
> limits accessibility and basically confines HTML’s role to large-scale browser
> software suitable for personal computers.
> · The conformance problem  due to the weaknesses of HTML and its inability to
> deal in a standard fashion with common publishing practices, current user
> agents do not display the level of conformance to HTML standards desired in a
> structured markup environment. In many cases, a given HTML document will
> display remarkably differently even on the same platform when displayed in
> different clients. Also, since HTML doesn’t provide services authors desire,
> much of the published HTML on the web is of very low quality.

Do we have some sense of the solution to these problems?
Can we give some sense of how we're going to approach them?
Even broad references to bodies of work that suggest
it's a straightfoward task?

-- 
Dan Connolly
http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
telephone:+1-512-310-2971 (office)

Received on Monday, 18 May 1998 18:29:02 UTC