Re: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

On Aug 1, 2008, at 18:46, Julian Reschke wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> ...
>> It was developed in a "distributed" (the one party away from  
>> others) manner as an extension. It was developed without a blessed  
>> framework for doing that kind of thing.
>> If there had been a blessed framework, would it have solved the  
>> lack of a Path object and the lack of a fallback mechanism from the  
>> start?
>> ...
>
> Define "blessed framework".

In this case, a framework designated for the purpose of extending the  
language by the definer(s) of the the part of the language that is  
considered to be the non-extension (core) part of the language.

For example, if the CSS WG says that CSS extensions should have - 
vendorstring- prefix, then naming extensions -moz-foo, -webkit-bar,  
etc. follows the blessed framework.

> Are you saying that a good extension not only requires peer review  
> in an open manner, but that it needs to be run through a *specific*  
> group?

It seems to me that the best way to get peer review for a feature is  
to announce the request for peer review in a forum already populated  
by the peers.

>>> What distributed extensibility gives us is disambiguation. But  
>>> that doesn't mean that things won't get peer review.
>> Would we be better off if <canvas> had its Apple origin  
>> unambiguosly on it for the rest of the existence of the Web? Would  
>> the Web platform be better if it were <apple:canvas xmlns:apple="http://www.apple.com/2004/07/namespaces/webkit/dashboard# 
>> "> instead of <canvas>?
>
> Actually, yes. It would allow the W3C to now standardize <canvas>  
> without having to deal with that legacy.

If there's significant existing content, UA developers need to deal  
with existing content no matter what the naming scheme. It's not  
helpful if specs don't document how to deal with stuff that needs to  
be dealt with when consuming Web content.

> Thinking of it, EXSLT is an excellent example: when the W3C dropped  
> work on XSLT 1.1, implementors worked together to collaborate on  
> much-needed extensions. And they could, because XSLT 1.0 got  
> extensibility right.


The WHATWG got going when the W3C dropped work on HTML. Would the Web  
platform be better off if all the stuff introduced by the WHATWG were  
in a WHATWG namespace and we were now debating whether to break it all  
by changing the domain name in the namespace URI from whatwg.org to  
w3.org?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 4 August 2008 07:42:39 UTC