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

Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> 
> Robin Berjon wrote:
>> In the spirit of tiptoeing around the situation some more, I'd like to 
>> point out that Working Drafts are NEVER normative. Only 
>> Recommendations are.
> 
> While true, a Working Draft is ipso facto something that is intended to 
> become a Recommendation if it gathers consensus.
> 
>> I understand the arguments for sync and I understand the arguments for 
>> splits. But there's no reason we have to decide now. Since this WG is 
>> populated with people who have enough time on their hands to discuss 
>> issues of little relevance to the actual technologies, paying 
>> attention to an extra document shouldn't tax anyone's resources. So 
>> push the draft out and see how things go. No kitten will be harmed.
> 
> As I said before, as long as there is a concrete plan for not ending up 
> with two Recommendations that are both normative and cover the same 
> ground, I'm fine with that.

I can only see one such scenario: where one there is a significant 
period of time between the publishing of the two Recommendations, the 
one published first is a proper subset(*) of the other one, and the one 
published later is identified as superseding the first (e.g., if the 
first is identified as HTML5 and the latter as HTML6).

Frankly, I see the likelihood of one or both documents not obtaining 
consensus is way more likely than the scenario mentioned above.

> I just don't want a situation where right now people say that it doesn't 
> matter because it's just a Working Draft and when it gets to be in Last 
> Call they claim that it's too late to object to the normative status or 
> the scope.

I agree with this.

> -Boris

- Sam Ruby

(*) Where subset means that the earlier release may contain things that 
exist in HTML4 but are removed in the later version:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#absent-elements
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#absent-attributes

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 23:58:11 UTC