Re: Rethinking HTML 5 (Was: Re: Semicolon after entities)

On May 1, 2007, at 12:45 PM, Matthew Ratzloff wrote:

>
> On Tue, May 1, 2007 11:41 am, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> On May 1, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Shane McCarron wrote:
>>> Perhaps if those implementation conformance constraints were
>>> defined in a separate specification, it would help to clearly
>>> divide the issue?  In the case of XHTML 2 the plan was always to
>>> have an implementors guide that went along with it to provide the
>>> sort of information I think you are talking about; but without
>>> confusing the authoring community with a lot of data that, frankly,
>>> is very domain specific.
>>
>> I think it's a mistake to consider document conformance requirements
>> to be general-purpose and user agent conformance requirements to be
>> "domain specific". First, it is essential that the two match up when
>> they overlap. Second, authors generally learn the language from
>> secondary sources, such as books, articles, tutorials, reference
>> guides, classes and examples. But none of those things exist for
>> implementors. So leaving out user agent conformance requirements to
>> make it easier for authors to read the spec is a bad tradeoff.
>
> Why not develop the standard as one document with the assumption  
> that when
> finalized it will be split into separate documents for Content  
> Authors and
> Implementors?

I think that would lead to a lot of repeated content and cross- 
references, for little practical benefit. And it's a lot of extra  
work for tour future editors. I'd like to leave it to their judgment  
how much to split the spec, unless there are major practical benefits  
to splitting out some particular section that outweigh the cost.  
Splitting document and user agent conformance requirements would be  
probably one of the most difficult splits to do.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 20:18:52 UTC