Extensibility strategies, was: Deciding in public (Was: SVGWG SVG-in-HTML proposal)

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> ...
> 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.
 > ...

I do agree that having syntax that makes extensions easier doesn't make 
new extensions better. Yes, the more new stuff is reviewed, the likelier 
it is that it will work.

However, history has shown that the absence of extension points does not 
lead to peer review, it leads to workarounds or hacks.

So these are orthogonal issues.

> ...
> 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?
> ...

May be I'm missing something, but of the new elements defined in HTML5 
(possibly with the exception of <canvas>), they only appear in 
experimental pages, which could easily be updated by the authors.

BR, Julian

Received on Monday, 4 August 2008 11:57:07 UTC