Re: W3C/WHATWG overlap going forward

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 5:28 AM, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> wrote:
> 1) A number of individuals within the WHATWG would like to see the W3C no
> longer copy and/or work on areas that overlap with ongoing WHATWG efforts.

I think that *if* the W3C is going to specify things that do overlap
WHATWG efforts, rewriting things to "not copy" is worse than copying,
since rewrites are likely to introduce subtle deviations. I think the
ideal outcome would be for the W3C normatively reference WHATWG specs
such that the normative statement get imported by reference under the
PP; see the last sentence of this email.

> There also is an interest in limiting the
> observable differences between what the WHATWG HTML spec and the W3C HTML
> require of both content producers and user agents.

Indeed.

> 3) We discussed proposals for modularity

This seems to contradict the point quoted above about limiting the
differences between WHATWG HTML and W3C HTML.

> 1) We expect to only provide non-substantive errata for 5.0.

Will 5.0 then be marked obsolete as soon as it is known to contain
substantive errors? It seems bad to let people read something that has
known substantive errors without warning the readers.

> 3) In 1Q15, we will identify which specs in the WHATWG the HTML WG would
> like to refer to directly, and will schedule a call with the director to
> build a plan.  Examples of documents that could be referenced by W3C HTML
> Work: Fetch, URL, Streams.

Cool. If Fetch, URL and Streams become referencable by the W3C, why
not WHATWG HTML itself so that the W3C could focus on extension specs?

I wonder if this WG could, from time to time, publish a REC that, in
addition to boilerplate, just says "This Recommendation normatively
references the snapshot of WHATWG HTML dated yyyy-mm-dd as if its
normative statements were included herein." (Where yyyy-mm-dd is
enough in the past for Members to have time to be comfortable. The
current track record suggests this doesn't need to be more than a year
in the past. I suppose continuing the statement with "except for X, Y
and Z" would still be better than the W3C publishing a different
document or, worse, a set of modularized documents and leave it as an
exercise to the reader to figure out the diffs.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/

Received on Friday, 28 November 2014 08:35:16 UTC