Re: clarification on Adobe Blocking

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de> wrote:
> Shelley Powers wrote:
>>
>> At least two members of this team, Ian Hickson[1] and Anne van
>> Kesteren[2], representing Google and Opera, respectively, have been writing
>> this morning that Adobe is officially blocking publication of HTML5. This
>> type of communication could cause FUD among the community of users, and
>> should be addressed as soon as possible.
>>
>> There was something in the minutes yesterday about a formal objection from
>> Larry Masinter [3], but the emails in this regard went to a protected email
>> list. However, Larry has discussed in the www-archive list[4], a publicly
>> accessible list, his objections to the publication of Microdata, the RDFa
>> document, and the Canvas 2D API, but not the HTML5 document, itself. And the
>> concerns I've read in this list have to do with charter and scope -- a
>> reasonable concern, I feel. Others of us have also expressed a similar
>> concern.
>> An unfortunate consequence of lumping multiple documents into one CfC is
>> that there is some confusion about when an action or objection is made
>> against one, it seems to be against all. Yet, and co-chairs, correct me if
>> I'm wrong, but we can object to any one of the documents, and it won't hold
>> up up the publications of the others. The lump CfC was a procedural short
>> cut, not an actual formal grouping.
>> As far as we know of, there is no Formal Objection blocking the
>> publication of HTML5...correct?
>> ...
>
> Correct.
>
> As far as I can tell (not having access to the member archives), there are
> objections (formal or not) about publishing some of the split-out material
> as FPWD, and potentially the update to RDFa (not sure about that). Some of
> the reasons have been discussed over and over again in the last weeks, so
> I'm not sure why people appear to be surprised.
>
> Unless I'm missing something, this does not affect the W3C specification
> called HTML5. Anyone who claims so is spreading misinformation on purpose.
>
> On the other hand Maciej said:
>
> "[11:00] <mjs> however the Chairs are unlikely to seek publication of only
> half of the proposed documents"
>
> (<http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/html-wg/20100212#l-48>)
>
> in which case these objections would indeed block publication of HTML5 as
> well -- but it would be very unfair to blame Adobe in that case.

I will note though that this, along with the many other threads
objecting to FPWD of the split out drafts, makes me very hesitant to
vote for further splits in the spec. At least as long as the intent is
for these split out specs to be published by the HTML WG.

I did vote against the split of the microdata spec because I think
that HTML5-proper needs a good author friendly mechanism for embedding
machine readable meta data, and so I think progress on HTML5 should be
coupled with progress of such as mechanism.

However in general I'm all for smaller orthogonal specs. But given all
the recent hassles it seems like the quickest way to get to rec is to
do no further splits.

Alternatively, any time we have a WG decision to create a split, tie
that decision to a FPWD publishing decision for the split out part. I
believe Manu's change proposal at some point contained such language,
but he was convinced to remove it unfortunately.

/ Jonas

Received on Friday, 12 February 2010 22:14:03 UTC