Re: An HTML language specification vs. a browser specification

On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 12:51 -0600, Robert J Burns wrote:
[...]
> I think this question of "who will edit?"  that keeps coming up is a  
> complete red herring.

While I agree with some of the goals you seem to be aiming for,
you completely lose me there. "He who does the work makes the rules"
proves out over and over, in my experience.

I share the concern about "a spec that continues to grow without bound"
but questioning the competence of the person doing the most work
for the past 5-10 years is... well, rude, for one thing... and
counter-productive for another: it alienates the very
people you're trying to persuade.

I haven't read all the mail in this thread yet -- I tend
to do other stuff on the weekends -- so I hope I'm not
repeating a point somebody has already made.

I have been doing a little bit of outlining and hacking;
I hope to contribute more substantially, provided
I can get my employment/funding situation figured out, 

I suppose it's healthy to air latent concerns once in a while,
but let's be more thoughtful about the way we do it, please.

> Hi Boris,
> 
> On Nov 16, 2008, at 10:56 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> 
> >
> > Robert J Burns wrote:
> >> I didn't intend to cause such a reaction. I thought it was clear  
> >> that the strengths of the current editor was in the area of browser  
> >> behavior (and not so much parsing and certainly not HTML authoring  
> >> vocabulary).
> >
> > I will note that you have not answered the question Maciej and I  
> > raised.  So again.  Who, in you opinion, is more qualified to  
> > address HTML parsing?
> >
> >> TAG and others have wondered whether the work on HTML 5 could  
> >> benefit from some division of labor and I simply wanted to suggest  
> >> that those three areas would be a great way to modularize this  
> >> effort.
> >
> > The prerequisite to this (even if desirable, and I urge you to read  
> > Ian's old posts about interdepencies before deciding whether it's  
> > desirable) is finding editors.  Which comes back to the question of  
> > who is qualified to edit.
> 
> I think this question of "who will edit?"  that keeps coming up is a  
> complete red herring. As a WG, I am confident we could find competent  
> editors for all of this (there is a lot of talent surrounding the W3C  
> and the HTML WG). The point is we need to find a way out of this  
> morass we're in. We have a spec that continues to grow without bound.  
> We have an editor who is extremely competent when it comes to browser  
> behavior issues, but not so much when it comes to parsing and HTML  
> vocabulary (markup and DOM). So if we decide to split these things up,  
> I'm confident we can find editors to step forward to take on these  
> tasks. The key thing is that we would be able to make the draft(s)  
> serve the needs of users and authors and not only a few browser  
> implementors.
> 
> Take care,
> Rob
-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 19:27:33 UTC