Re: "Controlled environments" in scope for HTML working group

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On Jan 2, 2010, at 7:41 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
> 
>>
>> Regardless of who funds the W3C as a whole, the charter of this
>> working group is quite clear on this point:
>>
>> "A language evolved from HTML4 for describing the semantics of
>> documents and applications on the World Wide Web."
 > ...

And the W3C glossary has the following definitions:

1. "(three words; also known as WWW) The set of all information 
accessible using computers and networking, each unit of information 
identified by a URI."

2. "An information space in which items of interest are identified by 
Uniform Resource Identifiers."

(<http://www.w3.org/2003/glossary/keyword/All/?keywords=world+wide+web>)

> I think we should treat usefuleness in a controlled environment as an 
> opportunistic benefit, but not a primary goal. In particular, if a 
> feature is truly only useful for controlled environments, then it's not 
> obvious it needs to be conforming for authors.
> ...

I'm not convinced that the distinction makes a lot of sense. For 
instance, an enterprise portal might be a "controlled environment". Is 
it on the public web? If I can access it from outside the firewall, 
behind a login mechanism? Yes? No? How is this different from pages on 
Amazon or my bank that require login?

In the end, what should be relevant is what developers ask for. And I 
*know* for a fact that in many "controlled environments" validity is 
important, so making things non-conforming that *are* in use in these 
controlled environments doesn't seem productive to me. In particular if 
we want these environments to adopt HTML 5.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Monday, 4 January 2010 17:48:44 UTC