Re: Definitions of standardisation and specification Re: Colloquial Tidbits

On Sunday, 18 September 2011 at 17:16, Dave Pawson wrote:
> On 18 September 2011 15:38, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)> wrote:
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > On Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 1:54 PM, Dave Pawson wrote:
> >  
> > > Up a level? What you have above is a definition of a 'standards document'?
> > Correct, it's actually a "de jure" standard:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_jure_standard
> >  
> > > I might take a view that a 'standard' is something widely used as a
> > > common [api? format?]
> > I see, that is referred to as a "de facto standard":
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto_standard
>  
> Good enough for me.
>  
> >  
> >  
> > > I.e. having a document is the first part (mostly necessary), the
> > > real standard is
> > > the next stage where the document is widely used, without (much) extension.
> > > Is sax a 'standard' compared to html?
>  
> So sax would be the de facto standard.
I guess so, yes: as there is no formal standard for SAX, AFIK. Yet, there are lots of tools that parse XML using the SAX model.  

> HTML 5 (as yet) de joure?
That one is interesting, actually. It's trying to formalise the de jure use of HTML into a proper standard (ratified through the W3C, initially developed by the informal WHATWG … which is a consortium, but not in the traditional sense… more like an open source project)  
> > Anyway, we should settle on one or two tasks for the group to begin with.
>  
> +1
>  
> Any favourites yet? further proposals?
My personal interests are in markup usage:
http://code.google.com/webstats/
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/

and API design patterns:  
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-scripting-syntax-and-features/
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-script-tokenization-javascript-dom/

I wonder if we can pick up where those guys left off?  

Received on Sunday, 18 September 2011 15:31:47 UTC