Re: ACTION-95, ISSUE-65: Plan to publish a new WD of HTML-5

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:

>
> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Philip TAYLOR
> <Philip-and-LeKhanh@royal-tunbridge-wells.org> wrote:
>> Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>
>>> Rather, the question is why this specification needs to be normative given
>>> that it contains the same information as the HTML 5 specification already
>>> does.
>>
>> Is the simple answer to this question not just
>> "because if it is non-normative, it is of no use" ?
>
> So would you say that the documents Dan and Lachlan have produced is
> of no use since they are informative?
>
>> If I, as a professional webmaster, need to know how
>> I must express myself in HTML 5 in order for my
>> document(s) to be valid, there is no point my looking
>> at a document that is simply informative
>
> Really? Does the same thing apply for other languages that you author
> content for? If you were to write a C program, would you go to the
> ANSI C99 spec? Or would you pick up a book or read a web tutorial.
>
> When you write a perl program, do you read the Pod documentation, or
> do you go read the perl source code (which as far as I can tell is the
> only thing resembling a spec for Perl5-)
>
> In my experience only experts in a language ever go look at the
> specification. They are simply too detailed to give non-experts enough
> of a high-level view that the information can be consumed. Non-experts
> tend to go to other resources that provides easier-to-consume
> information.
>
> / Jonas
>
>

I have to agree with that.  I've gone to the FORTRAN 77 spec two or three 
times and always as a measure of last resort.  Same for postscript.  I 
don't think I've looked at any other (non-html of course) specs depsite 
using a lot of other languages besides F77 and postscript.

For the most part, I think I've used spec mainly in cases where the 
implementation does something that seems wrong to me based on my 
already aquired understanding of a language.

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 19:31:49 UTC