Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> On Aug 24, 2009, at 10:13 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > I think we are running up against my lack of understanding of your 
> > view of how standards should work again. I'm still hoping that one day 
> > you might continue our conversation wherein I was trying to understand 
> > where you were coming from:
> > 
> >    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Nov/0233.html
> > 
> > Without understanding your positions, I really don't know how to 
> > address your feedback.
> 
> Yes, you do.

I truly and honestly don't.


> > (For instance, above, you use the word "defined" in a way that is 
> > completely at odds with my understanding. A feature is fully 
> > "defined", as I understand it, by the combination of authoring and 
> > implementation conformance criteria, which we have for <a name>, yet 
> > you do not consider it to be "defined".)
> 
> I use "defined" as it is found in any English dictionary. The only thing 
> HTML5 draft defines related to <a name> is browser behavior in response 
> to a fragment retrieval request, which may be sufficient for a BROWSER 
> that is limited to performing view operations.

This is incorrect.

HTML5 defines how "name" is to be processed as part of the HTMLCollection 
object for any implementation that includes DOM APIs, and the definition 
of the meaning of fragment identifier syntax for text/html documents, for 
any HTML processor.

No mention of browsers is made in any of these conformance critiera.


> It does not define the attribute's meaning

Clearly we have different ideas of what "define" and "meaning" are.


> nor the reason one might find it embedded in "text/html",

One might find all kinds of stuff embedded in text/html documents, I don't 
really understand what you are expecting here.


> nor the rationale for deprecating such content in favor of id-decorated 
> elements.

No rationale for decisions is included in the spec, since that would 
double its length easily.


> That is the difference between a spec that merely defines one version of 
> the language versus a spec that supplants all definitions of the 
> language, which is the point of the issue that is being suggested for 
> closure.

In that case, I completely disagree with your world view of how 
specifications should work.

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

Received on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 23:02:49 UTC