Re: A Proposal for Alignment with HTACG

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@cs.otago.ac.nz>
wrote:

> >  - Have setup a draft Project Charter.
>
> "to set up" is a phrasal verb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb),
> which means that the two words should be written as two words.
> ("setup" is the derived phrasal _noun_.)

As someone who is constantly irritated by such things, that's an
embarrassing typo.


> Is there any prospect of "official" Tidy plugins for Brackets and
WebStorms?
> I got hopelessly lost trying to understand the code of Brackets, or I'd
> offer to do it.

There's a _prospect_ for anything. Presently the team is focused on trying
to release a stable 5.0.0 of HTML Tidy with a single build system. However
there is a lot of interest in other build systems and IDE templates, perl
and php bindings, text editor integration, and so on. These are _all_
certainly things that HTACG could be interested in helping to
maintain/present/develop as the community grows. I don't know if anyone on
the small team right now is familiar with the Brackets and WebStorms, so I
cannot make any promises.

> I have been subscribed to html-tidy@w3.org for a long time.
> My experience with such shifts is that somehow my subscription _always_
> gets lost.  If subscriptions can be moved over *automatically* with no
> losses and no subscriber action required, fine.  If not, you *WILL*
> lose people.

This point is well taken. If it were only my personal decision I suppose I
would prefer to use the html-tidy@w3.org list, too. In the interest of
making a proposal that would be palatable to the current maintainers my
actual suggestion was to distance ourselves from this list.

> >  - The [original] W3 mailing list has a long history, however in that
some members
> >    have expressed disappointment in W3C's previous behaviors, perhaps
it is
> >    good to distance ourselves.
>
> Sorry, I don't buy that.  Talk about distancing yourselves from the
> organisation with custody over the very format that Tidy is *about* makes
> no sense to me.  W3?  Anyone working with Web stuff knows what that is.

Yes, and that's why HTACG is a W3C Community Group. HTACG is counting on
the current maintainers' cooperation, and there is some history between
HTML Tidy's current maintainers and the W3C that has caused friction in the
past. As I mentioned in an earlier reply to Alice on the list, my own
personal preference is to use the current list, however the proposal is
geared towards acceptability to the current maintainers.


> HTACG?  What's that?  The W3C may have a poor history of keeping Tidy up
to
> date, but at this stage it's a *better* brand than HTACG because it *has*
a
> history behind it.  It is only the W3 brand that will keep HTACG from
looking
> like just another fork.

HTACG is a convenient label to represent a community group that is "working
with the W3C," but isn't the W3C. We cannot claim to be the W3C, and the
W3C has long ago expressed its disinterest in maintaining Tidy. However as
you rightly point out, it's currently *only* this W3C affiliation
(including the repository redirect) that gives HTACG any credibility
whatsoever. Given how simple it is to create a community group, it's even
arguable that the credibility is minimal, which makes it critical for our
goals to work with the current SourceForge maintainers.


--
---
Jim Derry
Clinton Township, MI, USA
Nanjing, Jiangsu, China PRC