Neutrality in "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4"

On 29th June 2007, Lachlan Hunt wrote [1]:
> In fact, keeping detailed rationale out of the document will help to keep 
> the document more
neutral and objective, particularly in the early stages of development.

Indeed.

* By solely reporting facts it can only be faulted on factual inaccuracies.
* It would be even more concise if rationales were removed.
* It requires less editorial work if each fact it reports can stand alone.

I would not like to see *more* rationales added to this document. I *am* 
happy to see version 1.25 [2] published so we meet the heartbeat requirement 
[3], but I might suggest specific text changes to remove them afterwards.

The rationales are already public. But they are buried in two mailing lists 
[3][4] and some IRC archives [5] and a web forum [6] and *at least* one blog 
[7]. More like 5 blogs, IIRC.

Creating a "Rationales for HTML5 Features" document might be helpful. But it 
would need a lot of effort which I'm not willing to set aside but maybe 
others would. I could live without it but maybe others can't?

[1] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Jun/1033.html>
[2] 
<http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/html5/html4-differences/Overview.html?rev=1.25&content-type=text/html;%20charset=iso-8859-1>
[3] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/>
[4] <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/>
[5] <http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/>
[6] <http://forums.whatwg.org/>
[7] <http://blog.whatwg.org/>

Ben 'Cerbera' Millard
---------------------------------
Collections of Interesting Tables
<http://sitesurgeon.co.uk/!dev/tables/> 

Received on Sunday, 1 July 2007 17:37:55 UTC