Re: Normative status of author-only view of the HTML5 specification

On Jun 7, 2011, at 2:34 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> The question was: which one is authoritative if they disagree. Even if
> you say that they won't disagree because they are created from the
> same source, there will be corner cases where the Web developer
> document may be incomplete compared to the UA document. I would
> suspect that the UA document is more extensive and should therefore be
> the more authoritative one over the Web developer document.

Which section of the full spec is authoritative when two sections
have different requirements for the same content?  The answer is that
neither is more authoritative -- it is just a bug in the spec and we
would want to fix one of them.  Less complete?  Of course, some sections
are less complete than other sections --- that's the whole point of
providing a view that isn't dominated by poorly conceived and
untested english descriptions of parsing algorithms.

Perhaps there is a misunderstanding here about what "authoritative" means?
I would like to be able to say "this tool produces HTML5 content" and
reference the author-view as the definition of HTML5 content.
In fact, that is exactly what we as a working group agreed to in
order to satisfy the objections that the full spec was filled with
cruft that has nothing to do with the definition of HTML5 as content.
It is a reasonable compromise.

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 7 June 2011 22:01:54 UTC