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

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> On Aug 26, 2009, at 2:49 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>> I'm going to try to recap my understanding; which may very well be 
>> significantly imperfect, but perhaps if you both can point out where I 
>> veer off into the weeds, it might be useful in furthering discussion.
>>
>> First premise: there exist elements in the language that are widely 
>> discouraged (whether that is deprecated, obsolete, non-conforming, or 
>> whatever is immaterial to this particular discussion).  An example of 
>> such is the <plaintext> element.  However, even for such elements, it 
>> is important that the spec completely describes their behavior, and 
>> that conforming user agents have no observable behavior that differs 
>> from the behavior specified.
> 
> No.  It is important that the spec defines the language, because
> that is what the title of the spec claims to do and that is what
> the issue topic claims to supplant.  If it also described the
> behavior of conforming user agents (which, again, are only a very
> small percentage of the total applications of HTML), that's gravy.

When I first read this, I was concerned that your "No." encompassed the 
entire paragraph.  Upon more careful reading, I'm now convinced that you 
are disagreeing only with the last sentence.

In other words, it is OK for things to be deprecated.  It is OK to 
describe behavior.  It is not REQUIRED for behavior to be described, but 
it is OK for such to be included.

I'm OK with that.

I continue to believe that we should close Issue 53 on 2009-09-03, and 
tp continue to identify and resolve areas where the spec does not 
contain a sufficient definition of the language.  The process of doing 
so will undoubtedly turn up new information, and that new information 
could conceivably cause Issue 53 to be reopened.

I'll leave it up to you whether not it makes sense to track a separate 
issue to ensure that the specification meets the need of all HTML 
applications, not simply those that are directly or indirectly DOM 
based.  If you feel that it is important to do so, I'll gladly open an 
issue on this.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 18:16:47 UTC