Re: Renamed topic: focus and length of HTML5

Shelley Powers wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 11:14 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>> On Sat, 5 Dec 2009, Shelley Powers wrote:
>>> More importantly, more editors ensures an essential comprehensiveness.
>> Actually in my experience it's the other way around -- editors tend to
>> silo themselves, leading to gaps between specs. For example, separating
>> HTML4, DOM2 HTML, and XHTML1 led to huge gaps in the specs that we spent
>> significant effort fixing in HTML5. Avoiding this has been one of the
>> important features of work with Adam, Anne, Lachlan, and Larry (who have
>> edited specifications spun out of HTML5), and it has not been easy. Ask
>> Anne, for example, about handling the event loop mechanism. Ask Adam or
>> Larry about ensuring that we keep a coherent interface between their specs
>> and HTML5. It's easy to see how having more editors can quickly result in
>> a _loss_ of comprehensiveness -- quite the opposite of ensuring it, as you
>> assert above.
>>
> 
> Huge gaps?

Find a normative requirement saying in what order should script elements 
be executed. This, as in the example below, makes a fairly large change 
to the semantics of the second, middle, script. What if I dynamically 
added these scripts to the DOM to create something that should be 
serialized like this, where is it defined when they should be executed?

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<script type="text/javascript">
var a = 1;
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert(a);
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var a = 2;
</script>

How should the following be specified? What part should go in an HTML 
spec and what part in a DOM spec?

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write("<b>");
</script>
foobar</b>

What should the alert in the following? Again, where should the HTML and 
DOM parts of this be split?

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<iframe></iframe>
<script type="text/javascript">
var iframe = document.getElementsByTagName("iframe")[0];
iframe.src = "http://example.com/";
alert(iframe.getAttribute("src"));
</script>

Furthermore, if the HTML spec was entirely separate from DOM and defined 
in terms of a character stream, HTML and XHTML would need entirely 
different definitions (I'm also not sure how exactly you'd define the 
parser without it parsing to some sort of tree model).

-- 
Geoffrey Sneddon — Opera Software
<http://gsnedders.com/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Monday, 7 December 2009 16:34:03 UTC