Re: Design Principles

On Sat, 30 May 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> > 
> > We could have had a principle that said "Go critically through all the 
> > features of HTML 4 and see if there is much dead meat". But we do not 
> > have this. (And I suppose that one of the reason we do not have it is 
> > because such a principle would have defeated the "from scratch" 
> > principle.)
> 
> I agree, we don't have such a principle. But it does seem like a good 
> idea to any time you write a spec, go through all the features of that 
> spec and make sure that it still makes sense to keep them in the spec. 
> No matter if the reason they were in the spec in the first place is 
> because they came from a previous version of the spec or because it's a 
> newly added feature.

Indeed; the design principle wouldn't be "Go critically through all the 
features of HTML 4 and see if there is much dead meat", but "Go critically 
through all the features of HTML *5* and see if there is much dead meat", 
which I actually do regularly. This is mentioned in the FAQ:

   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_removing_bad_ideas_from_the_spec.3F

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 30 May 2009 19:46:12 UTC