Re: ACCESS' input, was: RE: Proposal for new WG to specify "Concrete APIs"

On 4/30/09 5:08 PM, Marcin Hanclik wrote:
> Hi Robin,
>
> I suppose my point was misunderstood or I expressed myself not clearly enough.
> By "on the implementation" level I mean how the content (being usually intelligent, e.g. by checking some UA parameters, e.g. by hasFeature()) can discover the capabilities of the UA.
> I did not mean that the UA implementation is intentionally marked incorrectly.
>
>>> WGs don't generally
>>> object to having people implement drafts early, so long as said people
>>> make it clear to their customers that they're not selling a stable
>>> long term solution, and so long as they don't claim conformance to
>>> anything.
>>> If anyone is getting the impression that WD=CR=PR=Rec the vendors are
>>> to blame I'm afraid.
> As stated above this is not the intended subject of my email.
>
> Still, for the content implemented based on WD or CR or PR or Rec, there is currently no way in Widgets 1.0 specs to discover which particular version of the WD was taken as basis for the potential WUA implementation.

Marcin, this is by design and totally on purpose. We don't want this to 
ever happen. This would be really really REALLY bad. Working Drafts are 
NOT TO BE IMPLEMENTED for shipping! Only implement them to fix a spec, 
not to ship to market. We clearly say "Implementers who are not taking 
part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing 
out from under them in incompatible ways."

If someone actually wants to do what you are suggesting, they should do 
that as a proprietary widget format and say absolutely nothing about W3C 
widgets.

> And versioning model for both content and WUA could help here, I think.

No. People should code to spec, not to implementation (and yes, this is 
to implementation because WD have holes that are being filled in 
proprietary/arbitrary ways: e.g., what URI scheme is BONDI's RI using? 
Why is it using that one when W3C has not even specified one? 
conformance FAIL). The Web is soooo broken today because vendors did 
what you are suggesting and now we have a 500 page HTML5 spec that tries 
to fix all the mistakes browsers vendors have ever made. Look at all the 
pain IE6 caused developers for not implementing to spec (this might not 
be MS fault because the specs were ambiguous)! all the work around and 
hacks, that's all bad! All the browser version checking code, etc. It's 
a freeken nightmare + all the reverse engineering everyone has had to do 
to render pages like IE does.

Don't repeat this for widgets!

> If my intentions are now clearer, I would be happy to hear your comments on them.

I hope I'm the one misunderstanding you and you are not seriously 
suggesting what I think you are suggesting.

Marcos

Received on Thursday, 30 April 2009 15:58:03 UTC