- From: Dailey, David P. <david.dailey@sru.edu>
- Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 23:10:59 -0400
- To: "Dan Connolly" <connolly@w3.org>
- Cc: "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs@apple.com>, "HTML WG" <public-html@w3.org>, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>, "Brendan Eich" <brendan@mozilla.org>, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, "David Hyatt" <hyatt@apple.com>, <lbolstad@opera.com>
Tue 4/10/2007 7:42 PM Dan Connolly wrote
>We're having some discussion of this proposal before the question is
>called. There have been some useful clarifications (e.g. pointers
>to the current version of the spec) and some concerns have been aired.
I agree.
Might it be possible to have a place or time (or some coincidence of both) in which those of us who either don't know if WHATWG contains something, or don't understand something, could ask dumb questions? I know there is an FAQ and there is an index, and the content is searchable, and there are archives of all the historic discussions. But here's a problem I'm having. I started eavesdropping on WHATWG back in January of this year -- rather halfheartedly, I will confess. That gives me a couple of months head start over some members of this group -- and only a few years of catching up to do with others. Tonight I had a small question* about the WHATWG HTML doc -- it is probably a dumb one. After an embarrassing long period of time I emerged empty handed, uncertain as to whether or not the document addresses the particular concern or not.
If this WG is to respond intelligently to the "proposal to adopt" the thing, it would be nice if we could go somewhere -- without having to interrupt the discussions of this group, just to ask naive questions about the proposal before us. Or maybe we could have a couple of days here of sanctioned "dumbing down" in which no question is too dumb? I know: some have made the argument that it's every member's responsibility to know all this stuff, and I sorta see the point. But somebody else seems to have argued that this isn't just about spec writers and browser developers -- it's also about authors -- and maybe even audiences. So a bit of hand-holding through some of this might prove useful to others than just me.
David
* Okay I guess I have to reveal the dumb question after all: does WHATWG allow for writing files client side? I see there is a super-cookie thing of some sort (the Storage interface), but I'm thinking of execCommand('SaveAs',false, '.txt') that was (is?) available in IE. About seven years ago I put together a little web app using VML (IE only) http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/grapher/ -- the utility of being able to save files to the client (or open them) should be relatively self-evident. Reading files client-side was a mess, but writing was fairly straightforward with an ActiveX thingy. (do a google search: reading files javascript)
Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2007 03:11:15 UTC