[Bug 8365] Remove the Web Browsers Section 6

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8365





--- Comment #8 from Matt <matt-heard@otiose.net>  2009-11-24 23:30:55 ---
(In reply to comment #3)
> Comment with my Apple representative hat on: 
> Apple is a developer and vendor of multiple HTML UAs, including a web browser,
> a widget runtime, a mail client, a chat application, a help viewer, a widget
> IDE, a dictionary application, and a consumer-level Web page creator(*). All of
> these UAs are based on the same underlying engine, WebKit. In addition, we ship
> WebKit as public API on Mac OS X and iPhone OS, leading to many more innovative
> types of HTML UAs.

Comment with my developer hat on:
I think this is backwards.  Apple is not a developer and vendor of multiple
HTML UAs, Apple is a developer and vendor of many different software products
that display formatted text.  And in all the cases you listed above, Apple has
said, "You know, HTML would be good for that."  (As opposed to, say, RTF.)

We've spent the last 10 years transforming the web browser from a document
delivery language to an application deployment platform.  It's been a messy
process (to say the least), and up until now, it's happened on a largely ad hoc
basis.  HTML5 promises to create a proper set of rules to define how a web
browser should behave, and advance the platform in a lot of really important
ways, which is very good.  Web development is, as a rule, terrible, and I'm
thrilled to see progress towards a single coherent standard for browser
behavior.

But where does that leave installed applications that just want to show a
little bit of formatted text?  If disentangling the formatting/parsing parts of
the spec from the web-browser-specific parts would really break as many
cross-references as you say, then why are you leaving it in the hands of
implementers to make that division?  It seems like a really bad sign for the
simple little formatting language we all know and love.


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Received on Tuesday, 24 November 2009 23:31:07 UTC