Language Specification

Philip TAYLOR wrote:

>
>>> ...language specification,
>>> towards which Mike's draft is an superb start.

Nothing against Mike personally, but he's not authorised to start 
anything official. It was supposed to just be something that Mike put 
together himself for the HTML WG to look at so we could decide *if* we 
needed such a spec, in stead it has been perceived as something 
officially produced and published by the HTML WG and is already causing 
confusion on mailing lists such as www-html and amongst various members 
of the public.

>>>
>>
>> I don't actually think that Mike should have started it.
>
> Why not ?
 
Because the HTML WG has not decided *yet* that we need such a spec. And 
if we do need a "markup language spec" it has not been decided who 
should write it, myself or someone else in the HTML WG may wish to be 
the editor and write the spec in a totally different way. You seem to 
think these decisions have already been made.

>   I see it as one of the most significant contributions
> to the work of this group to emerge so far,

That may be so, but I think the gun has been jumped here.

>
> have no hesitation in voting in favour of its publication 

I've already explained in detail why "voting" is not a good way for this 
group to make decisions.

------------------------------------------------------

We are talking about whether or not it should be published, but the 
public have already got the message that it has been published. If it 
hasn't already been published, then why am I seeing blog posts titled: 
"HTML5 Markup Language first draft published" [1] When people see stuff 
published on a W3C URL such as "www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/" they 
see it as "published work". I think it should be taken down or moved 
until we decide whether we are going down this path or not.

Karl Dubost has been blogging about it on the W3C Q&A blog [2] (then 
mentioned in the W3C news letter) as if it's an official publishing of 
the HTML WG, when we haven't even decided if we are having a "markup 
language" spec.

This is not acceptable.


[1] 
http://www.webdirections.org/blog/html5-markup-language-first-draft-published/
[2] http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/11/html_5_the_markup.html

-- 
Dean Edridge

Received on Thursday, 20 November 2008 16:56:05 UTC