Re: Splitting up the spec

Ian Hickson wrote:

> Should the Oxford English Dictionary be split into "common words" and
> "uncommon words"? How is that different?

Actually, it is. There is a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which,  
despite the name is still two very hefty volumes) containing all the  
common words, and the full Oxford English Dictionary containing  
pretty much all the English words which have been uttered by anyone  
at any point in history. (Though the former contains a subset of the  
words of the latter: they are not disjoint.)

A better analogy might be taking a "rulebook for using the English  
language" and splitting it up into separate books - the first  
providing just the vocabulary; the next explaining how grammar and  
punctuation work; another dealing with pronunciation; and another  
teaching essay writing.

It's not a matter of separating out what's common and what's not  
common. It's a matter of separating out the markup language (HTML),  
its API (DOM) and scripting environment features (SQL, storage,  
history, etc). Something like Javascript-accessible SQL has nothing  
to do with the HTML5 markup language per se - it just so happens that  
many people will use them together. As proof: I don't imagine that  
many browsers will prevent SQL API being used by HTML4 pages or  
XHTML2 pages. Some may also allow SVG and MathML to use it.

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Monday, 24 November 2008 13:41:25 UTC