Re: head@profile: another dropped attribute

Sam Ruby 2009-02-05 12.41:
> Rob Sayre wrote:
>> On 2/5/09 1:18 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> There is a pleasing trend in this mailing list towards civility
> and people taking the time to describe other's point of view in
> a fair and balanced way before proceeding to describe an
> alternate point of view.
> 
> Use of the term 'ideological' here bucks this trend.
> 
> An alternate way to describe the development of HTML 5 to date
> is that it has been developed starting from zero, includes only
> features that are deemed necessary to meet presented and
> accepted use cases, and operates under the rather significant
> constraint that such a spec, if followed by implementers, won't
> break the web.

Henri said that <font> is out for ideological reasons. That was a
claim about the non-WHATWG people, mostly. Then you offered the
"alternative" description that WHATWG started from zero. That to 
me is simply a confirmation of what Henri said - namely that 
WHATWG represents the non-ideological voice.

The "from zero" argument has often been used in this WG as a way 
to make any reference to the HTML 4 specification seem irrelevant. 
Please note: a reference to HTML 4 is not a proof that the 
participant does not look at it with fresh eyes.

I agree that one can say about a subject that "we tried to
look at it with fresh eyes" etc. It works as design principle, I 
think. But it does not work as an an argument in any debate 
because there is no guarantee that any two person that take it 
from scratch will end up with the same answer.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Friday, 6 February 2009 03:02:08 UTC