Re: TWO Change proposals for ISSUE-41 : Distributed Extensibility

On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, Ennals, Robert wrote:
>
> Proposal Y: tries to give a better fallback and backwards-compat story:
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/fixedprefixsimple

While I think this proposal is close to something that we should probably 
add to HTML5, I don't think it's "Distributed Extensibility". It would be 
more accurate to describe it as a convention for preventing vendor- 
specific non-standard extensions from clashing with themselves and future 
standard development.

I think this proposal would be better positioned as input for bug 9239 
rather than as a possible solution for ISSUE-41.


It would be helpful if the proposals for ISSUE-41 clearly stated the 
problem that they attempt to solve. It's not clear from the Summary or 
Rationale sections of the above change proposal what problem it is 
actually trying to solve. Several of the statements in the rationale do 
not line up with the proposed solution -- for example, it says "It is 
important that we allow [...] standards bodies to develop well-specified 
vendor-neutral extensions for HTML5", but we wouldn't ask standards bodies 
to use e.g. -wap-marquee just like we wouldn't ask ourselves to use e.g. 
-w3c-pattern. (In fact I would argue that standards organisations 
extending the language happens so rarely that it would be significantly 
better for such occasions to involve communication with the HTML WG such 
that clashes in syntax and direction are avoided by design.)

(I use -wap-marquee as an example because that's more or less what the WAP 
forum _did_ use with CSS, and I would consider that a process failure.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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Received on Tuesday, 16 March 2010 04:48:40 UTC