Re: Neutrality in "HTML 5 differences from HTML 4"

On Jul 1, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Ben 'Cerbera' Millard wrote:

> 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/>

I find this absurd that you would suggest that members of this WG  
track down rationales for changes made to the facilities in HTML from  
countless sites all over the internet. These rationales should not be  
that difficult for those participating in this WG and long-standing  
participants in the WhatWG  to simply summarize for the other  
members.  If you've all forgotten the rationales and would have to  
perform this research you're asking others of us to do, then to me  
that would be an indication that the rationales are very weak. In  
other words rationales that are strong are easy to remember, while  
those that used and easily forgotten are probably not sufficient for  
any of us to rely on. I would say that such weak rationales shouldn't  
even enter into our discussion here in this WG. Instead we should  
simply start from scratch and begin to discuss new, changed and  
deprecated facilities one by one. I personally would find that much  
more productive use of our time than to search through endless  
discussions that weren't memorable for anyone who participated in them.

The only value for this differences document currently is to help  
drive the decision making of this WG. The most productive use of our  
time would be to flesh out those differences with some summaries of  
the rationales behind the changes. In other words:  to understand the  
use-cases that led to those changes; the alternatives that were  
rejected; the rationales for dropping facilities; and so on. Again,  
this should be something fairly trivial to summarize for long-time  
participants in the process (for strong memorable rationales). It  
would be extremely cumbersome and perhaps even futile for those of us  
who did not participate in the original WhatWG to read through this  
lengthy record.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 07:33:08 UTC