- From: Justin Thorp <juth@loc.gov>
- Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:31:28 -0500
- To: "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs@apple.com>,"Karl Dubost" <karl@w3.org>
- Cc: "Sam Ruby" <rubys@us.ibm.com>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
(My apologies for not answering inline... We have antiquated e-mail software that doesn't allow us to do such things.) "so we'd really like to know if HTML5 is on the wrong track." - Maciej There are a lot of great conferences coming up where we (as in the HTML WG) can actually talk to the Web developer community. Is someone going to be talking about HTML5 at South by Southwest Interactive [1], Future of Web Apps [2], etc? What about publishing an article in A List Apart[3] about the canvas element? We could ask for feedback. Ask people if they'd use it. What about using the Web Standards Project [4] as a way to outreach to the general web dev community in regards to the canvas element and generally html5? - justin [1] http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/ [2] http://futureofwebapps.com/2008/miami/ [3] http://www.alistapart.com/ [4] http://webstandards.org/ ****************** Justin Thorp US Library of Congress Web Services - Office of Strategic Initiatives e - juth@loc.gov p - 202/707-9541 >>> Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> 11/20/2007 7:31:24 PM >>> On Nov 20, 2007, at 4:05 PM, Karl Dubost wrote: > > Le 21 nov. 2007 à 08:26, Maciej Stachowiak a écrit : >> While some weight should be given to having a serious shipping >> implementation with nontrivialn market share, I hope I do not need >> to point out that weighing opinion strictly by market share is >> clearly anti-competitive. > > > /me wonders what will be your stake if a big majority of web > designers and web developers were requesting to pull out some > features of the specification. In terms of business market shares, > they represent a lot more than browser developers. A full business > and market has been developed around their *own* practices. Obviously we should consider it if such a request was made en masse. I think such an occurrence is unlikely, for the following reasons: 1) A subset of elite web designers sometimes oppose new features, for various reasons. Usually these are ideological (a proposed HTML feature is "too presentational") or due to the cost of updating their education and advocacy practice. But web practitioners as a whole largely seem to want new features to be available, and certainly do not mind them being available as long as old features are not removed. 2) Web designers clearly want more functionality than open web technology can provide today; they vote with their feet by using proprietary technologies like Flash or ActiveX, semi-proprietary technologies like Java, or nonstandard but widely implemented features of the open web technology stack. 3) In my six-year career as a browser engine developer, I cannot recall a single customer or developer request to remove an engine feature. But we get requests for new engine features (standard or not) all the time. I do recall complaints when we removed features that were so broken that they were creating compatibility problems. For example we had partial emulation of IE's quirky handling of DOM attributes where they are reflected directly as JavaScript attributes, this actually caused sites to break because they expected either the IE or the Firefox behavior, not our halfway compromise. But we still had some complaints when we removed it. So, I'm wondering, are there actually specific features that a majority of web designers and web developers doesn't want? What are these features? Where is the evidence that web developers want them removed? Apple and the WebKit Project aim to give web developers the tools they need to make great web documents and applications, so we'd really like to know if HTML5 is on the wrong track. > I guess it is why Sam asked for defining the "we". In this context, by "we" I meant "the HTML Working Group". > It is why often a charter is being defined to avoid that the will of > people or a group is being taken ov er by a few individuals. It is > usually to help to guarantee the life of the group. It is part of > the social process. But decisions on the charter are made by fewer people than ordinary Working Group decisions. So I don't see how deciding things at the charter level prevents the will of the people from being denied. If anything, it seems like a very narrowly construed charter could only block the will of the group. Regards, Maciej
Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 21:32:00 UTC