RE: Request to halt the heartbeat publication of HTML5 WG Draft

Hi all,

I understand there is a lot of pre-history to this specification.
I also understand that the effort of the WHATWG was good and prompted a
needed revision of the HTML specification.
I don't know all the ins and outs.

But this is all very confusing to me and, I would guess to many other
people as well.

Like it or not, I bet most companies large and small, are looking
towards stable, proven organisations to provide high quality
specifications of a great stability before embarking on investments that
have long term effects for everybody involved.

It is clear that a lot of interest rides on this specification and many
people have put in lots of time to make it happen.
This is great.
But there can be no gain for anyone in having these types of
discussions, this late in the game.

Perhaps this is naive to ask, but is there any way to cut to the chase
and issue a single, non-confusing, definitve specification under the
auspices of the W3C so I and those like me don't have to advise a bunch
of non-technicians which specification we should follow in which
instances?
This would of course require that all differences are removed and the
specifications merged.
To me this does not seem impossible considering the caliber of people we
have in this working group.

Thanks
Kai











> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Ruby [mailto:rubys@intertwingly.net] 
> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 3:48 AM
> To: Philippe Le Hegaret
> Cc: HTML WG
> Subject: Request to halt the heartbeat publication of HTML5 WG Draft
> 
> The change cited below adds the following to the WHATWG draft:
> 
> +   <li>The W3C version omits a paragraph of implementation advice for
> +   political reasons.</li>
> 
> And the following to the W3C draft:
> 
> +  <p>The specification published by the WHATWG is not identical to  
> + this specification. The main differences are that the 
> WHATWG version  
> + includes features not included in this W3C version: some features  
> + have been omitted as they are considered part of future 
> revisions of  
> + HTML, not HTML5; and other features are omitted because at the W3C  
> + they are published as separate specifications. There are also some  
> + minor differences. For an exact list of differences, please 
> see the  
> + WHATWG specification.</p>
> 
> To have the W3C specification refer readers to another 
> specification for an exact list of differences, and to have 
> that other specification indicate that the omission was due 
> to political reasons is intolerable.
> 
> At this time, I am asking that the upcoming heartbeat 
> publication of the
> HTML5: A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML 
> Working Draft be halted until one or both are corrected.
> 
> Short background:
> 
> A number of people objected to a paragraph on image analysis 
> heuristics, and as such, we asked for rationale for this 
> paragraph.  Receiving rationale for the removal of this 
> paragraph and receiving no rationale for its retention, we 
> made a decision that the contents of this paragraph get 
> removed from this document and requested that it be 
> incorporated into the UUAG draft.
> 
> As long as the WHATWG draft is used as a vehicle to discredit 
> the W3C, then we will insist that all references to the 
> WHATWG specification be removed from the W3C specification.
> 
> Full background can be found here:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/66
> http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/40318/issue-66-objection-poll/results
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jun/0001.html
> http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9835
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/track/actions/46
> 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/in
troduction.html#is-this-html5?
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/spec.html#status-of-this-document
> 
> - Sam Ruby and Paul Cotton
> (Maciej is on vacation)
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [Bug 9835] Remove image analysis
> Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2010 05:55:22 +0000
> From: bugzilla@jessica.w3.org
> To: rubys@intertwingly.net
> 
> http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9835
> 
> --- Comment #3 from contributor@whatwg.org  2010-06-05 
> 05:55:22 --- Checked in as WHATWG revision r5101.
> Check-in comment: Remove a paragraph from the W3C version by 
> request of the chairs. Add a list of differences between the 
> versions of the spec to the WHATWG version now that there's 
> more than a few. Add a paragraph to the W3C version 
> mentioning this. Make it easier to keep track of what is in 
> what version of the spec when editing.
> http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=5100&to=5101
> 
> --
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Received on Wednesday, 9 June 2010 08:06:06 UTC