Re: Intranet pages

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Aug 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> > >
>> > > Your sampling is flawed because it doesn't account for a significant
>> > > number of web pages that are not accessible to the public.
>> >
>> > Pages that are not part of the Web do not need to use a standard
>> > interoperable across the entire Web, they can use proprietary formats.
>>
>> Sorry? I think this is something we need to discuss. Just because a
>> web-based application only runs on an intranet doesn't mean it's
>> irrelevant. It just means it is harder to collect data about it.
>
> Standards are important for cases where software from unrelated vendors
> has to interoperate. By definition, content in a walled garden such as an
> intranet is controlled by a single organisation, and therefore a standard
> is unnecessary -- local conventions are a perfectly suitable substitute.
>
> This doesn't mean that we shouldn't take intranet use cases into account,
> but it does mean that if we fail to address an intranet use case, or if we
> make an intranet-incompatible change, software vendors can provide vendor-
> specific extensions that solve the problem without affecting the rest of
> the community. We see this all the time, for example IE8 has Intranet-
> specific features, and even defaults to different rendering modes in
> Intranet environments; similarly, intranet frequently make use of custom
> ActiveX components in a way that would simply not work on the open Web.
>
> I care about the open Web first and foremost. If we can make a technology
> that happens to displace proprietary alternatives in walled gardens,
> that's a bonus. It's not a goal, however. If it _was_ a goal, we'd be
> woefully underprepared to address it. Indeed our entire approach would
> probably have to be rethought. It would also mean we probably couldn't
> suitable address the open Web use cases; the two are, in many cases,
> incompatible in pretty fundamental ways.
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
>

You should care about the web, period, and it shouldn't matter which
side of a security wall it exists. I would expect nothing less from
someone purporting to be the author of the next version of HTML.

But to return to the topic that generated this thread: summary.
Previously, you stated that you're basing your decisions about summary
on  a set of data that has been shown to a) be tainted, because bad
summaries are too closely tied to bad table usage;  b) dated, with
implementations most likely ranging over a decade of use and therefore
not definitively demonstrative of current practices; c) incomplete,
because it only takes into account a fraction of all possible data,
derived from privately maintained data stores, based on scraping
public pages, not data in intranets (nor can we tell how
representative the data sampling is, since we don't control the data
store).

I have been told that you all are using scientific methodology to
support your decision on summary, and the presentation of the data
just described, would seem to support such a declaration. However,
when I, and others, have pointed out the flaws in the method [1], or
the data (such as in this email), then we're told this is a language
issue, and that scientific methodology doesn't count. Well, if
scientific methodology doesn't count, then previous arguments that are
supposedly based on using scientific methodology, are now moot.

Therefore there is no real, sound, or unchanging argument, for your
decisions, other than personal preference.

This is an interesting thread, though it does concern me to see an
author of the HTML 5 specification be so dismissive of intranets.
Frankly, so unfamiliar with intranets. I have worked on several, using
a variety of backend technologies, but they all have one thing in
common: HTML. I'm not sure what else you think is used to build the
user interface portion of the intranets.

And "open web" is about technology, not sides of a security wall, or
location of use. Interesting that you think otherwise.

Shelley

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/0106.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/0125.html

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 12:49:44 UTC