Re: The harm that can come if the W3C supports publication of competing specs

On 1/16/10 10:21 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> Both RDFa+HTML and microdata are ready for implementations and author
> adoption, though, right?  So isn't it incorrect to suggest that they
> aren't?

microdata is in CR?  See 
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/Process-19991111/tr.html#Recs for 
the definitions of the REC-track phases.  The one where implementation 
experience is asked for is CR.

Now UAs and authors can of course experiment with things that are in 
earlier stages, but that's all it is: experimentation.  Such 
experimntation is useful, obviously, but until you get into CR there are 
no guarantees of the spec not radically changing under you.

In CSS, CR is the stage at which you get to start dropping your vendor 
prefixes from your implementation.  It's too bad, in some ways, that 
other languages don't have a fallback story that allows similar 
relatively-painless namespacing of experimental features...

In any case, neither microdata nor rdfa+html is in CR.  So they are not 
in fact "ready for implementation and adoption".  They're still at the 
"maybe ready for some experimentation; if you try, expect your stuff to 
get broken" stage at best.

-Boris

Received on Sunday, 17 January 2010 05:11:59 UTC