Re: {agenda} HTML WG telcon 2009-05-21

Larry wrote:

> Speaking as someone with a long-term investment in web standards:
>
> Design Principles:
>
> My main objection to the Design Principles (and the document that has
> resulted from them) is the fundamental assumption -- made from the
> beginning, alas -- to confound the "describe, as best we can, what HTML in
> the wild is today, and how to process it in a way that is bug-compatible
> with IE" with the other goal of "define new features that increase the
> expressivity and interactivity of the web", in a way that fundamentally ties
> any future advances to the mess of the past. I think it's a step backward,
> unnecessary, and leads to  a much worse, broken, inconsistent, and unhappy
> world for users, authors, and future browser-makers. It was a bad technical
> decision, made for short-term political (browser-wars) reasons.

That would be the "Pave The Cowpaths" Design Principle. This principle
has been debated at length. See the May 2007 thread starting at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/thread.html#msg940

Working group members disagreed as well as strongly disagreed with
that principle in the August 2007 survey.
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/dprv/results#xptcp

> I agree with Sam's contrasting the normal role of "editor" from Ian's role
> as "author" (which is more appropriate than "dictator" since Ian controls
> the document but not people directly).

Actually the 2007 survey was for "editors" not for an "author".
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/htmlbg/results#xhtml5eds

That survey also had a question to adopt HTML5 as our specification
text to review. Not to accept. It specifically said:

> A "yes" response indicates a willingness to use these documents as
> the basis for discussion with the editors and the WG going forward.
> It does not constitute endorsement of the entire feature set
> specified in these documents, nor does it indicate that you feel that
> the documents in their present state should become a W3C
> Recommendation or even a W3C Working Draft.
http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/htmlbg/results#xspectxt

Related references:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Sep/0009.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Aug/0963.html

Best Regards,
Laura

-- 
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Thursday, 21 May 2009 12:30:15 UTC