- From: Michael(tm) Smith <mike@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 20:29:24 +0900
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Cc: public-html@w3.org
Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, 2008-09-04 11:49 +0200: > My question remains: is it a good idea to make it harder to > generate HTML5 than it needs to be? Of course not. But you can't simply consider the criterion of "good idea to make it harder to generate HTML5 than it needs to be" in isolation. The thoughts that Henri has been posting recently (and for some time before, actually) about not wasting people's time seem relevant here. Or in general (and however you care to word it or see it), the idea that we all should be making a good-faith attempt at trying to objectively consider what the net costs to everybody are for what ends up in the spec, including doing that for things that are a high priority (for whatever reasons) to each of use personally. In this case, it seems like we have real a cost of complicating the spec (and making things not-insignificantly more complicated and confusing for authors who need to figure out how best to try to conform to the spec) by adding an additional/ optional form of the doctype -- we don't get it for free in terms of what it costs in peoples' time... ...and we need to take that and weigh it against the cost of it being more difficult (but that said, not impossible) for authors using XSLT in their toolchains to generate conformant HTML5 output. As somebody who has made a lot of use of XSLT and who sees real value in XSLT, I personally would like for it to be as easy as possible to generate HTML5 output from XSLT engines. But I would like to try to make sure that doesn't bias me away from really trying to consider in good faith what the net costs to everybody would be. Anyway, as Henri has alluded to in some of his messages, it's very hard to anybody to be able to legitimately assert that they have made a completely objective judgment about the costs of some of the choices around issues that have been under discussion[1]. Given that, in cases where people involved in the discussions consistently and repeatedly keep insisting that their own evaluation/assessment/conclusion of the costs is the only right/logical/reasonable one -- without even acknowledging that it just may not be totally clear-cut (as much as they might like to be), well.. that especially doesn't help a whole lot in trying to move the discussion toward a productive resolution. And no, I don't intend to say that's what you're doing in this case, but just in general that it's a problem in a good number of the contentious discussions on public-html. --Mike [1] For example, having a rationale, not-unnecessarily complicated spec, free from cruft and junk that should not have been in the language in the first place and maybe would not have been if as much thought and discussion about it had taken place as has been for the issues we've been discussing... vs. ...making certain "legacy" markup non-conforming even for cases of markup that while it may be bad from a markup purity point of view, is something relatively common in existing content, that don't cause any unexpected behavior in browsers, and that may be something that many or most of the authors using already know it not best-practice markup but that they have chosen to use in spite of that -- maybe for good reasons -- and that it may likely be a waste of their time to have a conformance checker warn them about --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://people.w3.org/mike/
Received on Thursday, 4 September 2008 11:30:07 UTC