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

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't imagine, though, that Aryeh speaks for all of the MediaWiki
> development group. Aryeh, do you speak for the entire group? Are you
> stating MediaWiki's official position in this regard?

Of course not.  I'm one volunteer developer, and what I say is only my
own opinion.  However, further questions about MediaWiki development
should go to wikitech-l or to me privately, and I won't answer them
here -- I doubt most of the subscribers to this list are interested.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> On 1/17/10 7:46 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>>
>> Aren't there lots of features regularly discussed here that can't be
>> changed despite the fact they were never put in a CR?  Things like
>> localStorage
>
> Which is now widely viewed as a huge mistake, right?

Sure, but so is half the web platform, right?  :)  You have to make a
tradeoff between shipping lower-quality features sooner, or
higher-quality features later.  Is the extra time to deployment worth
the gain in quality?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  If the goal of
HTML5 is to advance the web by making it a more attractive platform
than proprietary competitors, then getting more basic features out
there faster will get us a lot closer to parity.

Better to have basic video out there now so we can start chipping away
at Flash video's market share ASAP, than to put it off an extra year
to make sure it's better.  Same for localStorage, same for all the
major new features that are essential for doing key things in a
standard way.  A mediocre standard is better than no standard, because
with no standard you're giving a lot more room for proprietary
technologies to grow.

This isn't so true for standards that already have basic functionality
and are mostly just being refined.  As an author, I mostly don't care
so much about getting new CSS features soon.  HTML5 is what I want to
see soon, even if some parts are half-baked, because it opens up
possibilities that just don't exist now.

Received on Monday, 18 January 2010 20:45:14 UTC