Re: Should we Publish a Language Specification?

On Thu, 20 Nov 2008, Julian Reschke wrote:
> > 
> > 3) Mike's document seems to have the implied premise that content 
> > producers, unlike consumers, won't be interested in the scripting 
> > interfaces. But a large proportion of Web content, especially content 
> > on the most popular sites, includes some script, and correctness of 
> > that content depends on scripting behavior. Some elements, such as 
> > <canvas>, <event-source>, or to a lesser extend <video>, don't even 
> > make sense without their scripting interfaces. So it seems to me it is 
> > not even very useful as an authoring guide.
> 
> Total disagreement. The elements you mention may be important for the 
> browser platform, but are totally meaningless for HTML5 as a document 
> markup language. Thus they should be defined in optional modules.

Would you say the same for <script> and <style> in HTML4? How about 
<input type="hidden"> and <button type="reset">? How about the form 
submission model?

(I'm trying to work out where you draw the line.)

Some features aren't useful for the browser platform at all, but are very 
useful in other contexts, like <meta name="generator"> or <a rel="tag">. 
Should these features also be taken out of the language specification and 
put into another specification? How about the outline processing model, 
which defines which header applies to which section? That only applies to 
certain conformance classes (primarily data mining tools and authoring 
tools); should it also be removed?

I believe you have also said that you believe that the IDL blocks and the 
definitions of the element interfaces should be in a separate document. If 
this is the case, would you propose defining the processing that an 
<input> element should receive when its type is dynamically changed in the 
scripting specification, or in the vocabulary specification? These 
requirements would be mostly only applicable to scripted browsers, but 
other user agents could also be affected (e.g. authoring tools or scripted 
automation tools).

If you could clarify your position that would be very helpful.

Thanks,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 22 November 2008 22:46:24 UTC