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

On Tue, 16 Mar 2010, Ennals, Robert wrote:
> 
> I outlined several such problem statements in my proposals. In 
> particular:
> 
> It is often useful for people to define extensions to HTML.

On the contrary, it's rather rare, as far as I can tell.


> These may be vendor-specific experiments for features that may 
> eventually get folded into the main HTML spec. They may be 
> enterprise-specific extensions that would be of little use for general 
> HTML. They may be community-specific features that are useful to too few 
> people to make sense as part of the core spec. They may be experiments 
> by a relatively obscure group on top of a patched open source browser 
> that turn out to work well and get adopted by a vendor.

The above isn't a problem statement, since all of the above happens today. 
What is the problem with the status quo?

Is this the problem?: "People who want to invent non-standard proprietary 
extensions to HTML for private use or for experimental use do not 
currently have guidelines describing a convention they can use to do so in 
a manner that reduces the risk of such extensions causing problems with 
future development of HTML itself."


> I think there is value in allowing people to experiment with extensions 
> such as SVG, MathML, FBML, 3D, Canvas, etc, without having to wait for 
> the HTML WG to merge such specs into the HTML standard.

People have been doing that (with all five!). Where's the problem?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 04:08:57 UTC