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

At 10:08  -0500 29/01/09, Murray Maloney wrote:
>  A little bit of co-operation goes a long way, but co-operation
>is most effective when it is reciprocated regularly. You should try sometime.
>
>I think that you have made your point. Repetition of your argument does
>not convince me -- it never has. We do not see eye to eye.

Indeed.

I personally support Haakon's position.  Having two specifications 
that both claim to be normative about the same subject material has 
never, in my experience, been a good idea.  It seems that it has 
always resulted in avoidable problems, confusion, and conflict.  This 
is an opinion shared by others on this list.

What is your answer to the question "when the two normative 
specifications are in conflict, which one takes precedence?"  And if 
your answer is that they are perfectly in alignment, and there never 
will be conflict, I look forward to seeing your large bug-free 
software projects. :-)

And yes, I know that a single specification can (will) also have 
bugs;  but adding a second normative specification adds to that count 
(all the matters for which either document alone is clear, but the 
two documents disagree).


In the request "we'd like to put this document on a path to 
publication as normative, as it's useful" the only aspect I am seeing 
push-back on is "as normative".  HTML5 is large, and to be 
successful, will need to be supported by a number of publications -- 
the spec., "views" of the spec. automatically produced from it, 
hand-produced perspectives of the document more suited to some 
audiences, tutorials, examples, and so on.


Having this document claim to be normative has an obvious, stated 
problem.  I am still unclear what the resistance is to having it 
informative, useful, and on track to publication.


-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 15:56:57 UTC