Re: ISSUE-59: normative-language-reference FPWD

Sam Ruby wrote:
> 
> In yesterday's call, a number of issues were raised when the topic of 
> making "HTML 5: The Markup Language" available First Public Working 
> Draft.  A number of issues were raised during the discussion.  Whether 
> these were merely issues to be worked or meet the criteria for a Formal 
> Objections was less clear to me.
> 
> To help facilitate and focus the discussion, a few links:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/
> http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr.html#first-wd
> http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies#WGArchiveMinorityViews
> 
> It surprises me to have to say this given the makeup of this group, but: 
> don't be shy!

The markup language spec duplicates material that is already in the HTML 
5 spec. My understanding is that a FPWD puts a document on the REC track 
so I presume it would be expected to be a largely normative document. It 
is clearly a bad idea to duplicate normative material between two 
different documents. Therefore it seems that we should seriously 
consider whether putting this document on the REC track is the right 
thing to do; I guess doing so would require us to remove the 
corresponding material from HTML 5, get all the cross-references right 
do as not to leave any undesirable gaps where the two specs join and 
continue to edit the documents in lockstep so they do not become out of 
sync in the future. We would really want to be reasonably certain that 
this represented a net win for the utility of the whole before embarking 
on such a substantive change given the tight timeline before LC (either 
in the W3C's original estimation or in the editor's estimation).

My intuition is that this effort is not worthwhile and that the markup 
spec should remain as an informative document rather than as a normative 
one. I would fully support publishing such a document as an informative 
note along with the final HTML 5 spec.

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 12:04:22 UTC