- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:32:16 +0200
- To: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Cc: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Jan 23, 2009, at 13:34, 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. I am opposed to publishing "HTML 5: The Markup Language" as a REC track draft (or on an unspecific track but claiming normativity). This view also represents a broad enough consensus at Mozilla. We'd be OK with publishing it as a draft on track to become a Note that gives an informative view to a subset of the subject matter over which "HTML 5" is normative. The specific objections are the following: 1) "HTML 5" already normatively defines the HTML5 markup language. It doesn't make sense for the working group to compete with itself by publishing two normative documents about the same to thing. (Resolving this by removing the overlap from "HTML 5" would not be an acceptable way to resolve this, since that would lead us back to bad old situation where the "language" and the processing model are in different specs with a risk of things falling through the cracks.) 2) "HTML 5: The Markup Language" makes a schema normative. Experience with HTML4 shows that normative schemas freeze innovation and competition in validator development, because one implementation is declared normative and improvements on the implementation are considered wrong. For years, HTML4 validation wasn't improved at all. Validator.nu, Validome and Relaxed have now improved on things but are still seen as illegitimate compared to DTD-based HTML4 validation. If the document is frozen at a certain snapshot in time (as a REC would be frozen), validators either couldn't improve or would have to deviate from the normative schema at the risk of being perceived illegitimate. A schema is code--a part of a validator implementation. WGs don't make particular snapshots of C++ code normative, either. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 13:32:59 UTC