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

On Tue, May 1, 2007 1:18 pm, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On May 1, 2007, at 12:45 PM, Matthew Ratzloff wrote:
>> 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.

Nah.  You have a complete document for implementors and a much smaller
document containing the allowed tags and usage guidelines for content
authors.  Content authors have no need or desire to view implementation
details.  They want to know what tags, attributes, and attribute values
are allowed and what they do.  A second, smaller document detailing the
changes from HTML 4 would also be helpful to them.

The first document (content authoring sub-specification) can be created by
copying the full specification and deleting huge swaths of text from it. 
The second document (changes from HTML 4) can be created based on the
content authoring sub-specification and the HTML 4 specification over the
course of a couple of afternoons.  I would be happy to write that.

-Matt

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 20:36:39 UTC