Re: Publishing the HTML 5 draft

On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:05:01 +0200, Philip Taylor (Webmaster)  
<P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote:

> My recollection (which may, after all this time, be flawed)

I think your recollection is accurate.

> is that the group agreed to publish the Design Principles
> document first.  I do not believe that we have yet
> agreed these, let alone published them, so is it not
> premature to thing of publishing another document
> (the HTML 5 Draft) without the Design Principles
> document as a fundamental pre-requisite ?

I don't think so, for the following reasons:

1. The decision to publish design principles was as I recall an attempt to  
get something published in time to make our heartbeat requirment (or  
nearly make it). It turns out that the premise seems flawed, so I suggest  
we revisit the decision.
2. The design principles are principles, not an absolute rule. In any  
case, it seems that they are an attempt to document the way we will  
approach competing goals, but that the actual decisions in such cases will  
be made case-by-case with reference to the design principles, rather than  
by following them as some magic formula. So they may not be as critical as  
one might have thought a priori.
3. Work is continuing on the specification, and it would be helpful to  
give the world a stable reference as a snapshot while both the principles  
and the draft itself are still in active development. We would be  
publishing a draft, and it is known that there are a zillion issues -  
hopefully many of them will be clear in the draft or in the diff document  
(which I think we should publish in draft form at the same time).

I think we should still publish the design principles, or a draft of them  
in their current state (i.e. without consensus but as a reference for  
comment). I just don't think that holding back a formal publication of the  
specification's current state until we have agreed the design principles  
is justified.

cheers

Chaals

> Philip TAYLOR
> --------
> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>  The Working Group has been in the running for over half a year now. I  
>> think it would be good if we published the HTML 5 draft[1] to let the  
>> outside world know what we're looking at and what we're working on to  
>> improve. Maybe in addition we could publish the HTML 5 differences from  
>> HTML 4 draft[2] which informally documents the differences between HTML  
>> 5 and HTML 4. (I've updated that document recently to reflect the  
>> latest changes to the HTML 5 draft.)
>>  Kind regards,
>>   [1]<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/>
>> [2]<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/diff/>
>>



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals              Try the Kestrel - Opera 9.5 alpha

Received on Friday, 19 October 2007 02:33:33 UTC