Alternate HTML 5 adoption proposal? (Was Re: Level of specification detail)

The WHAT WG specification does primarily two things:

1. Specifies how existing browsers render HTML
2. Evolves HTML by adding new elements, etc.

Is it possible, instead of adopting WHAT WG's HTML 5 specification
wholesale, to extract the parts of the specification that pertain to
HTML's implementation as it exists today?

Perhaps we can then adopt #1 as-is, and discuss and adopt (or reject) the
individual parts of #2 in a piecemeal fashion.

I think we can all agree that increased implementation specificity is
desirable.  On the other hand, I (and it seems some others) worry that it
will be far more difficult to remove certain aspects once they're "in the
spec" than it will be to adopt them one or two at a time.

-Matt

On Wed, April 11, 2007 11:07 am, ryan wrote:
> What we lack is a specification for how to implement HTML user agents
> that is unambiguous, rigorous, complete and has a test suite.
>
> I don't think this WG needs to worry about educating authors, instead
> it should focus, at least in the near term on bridging the divide
> between HTML "as specified" (HTML4) and HTML "as implemented" (which
> is what HTML5 is designed to do).
>
> Just to be clear, I completely support the proposal that started this
> thread.

Received on Wednesday, 11 April 2007 19:34:28 UTC