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

>"These two specifications are generated from common base text and are intended to be entirely consistent. Both are normative and authoritative. ...

I can live with this text but I want to point out that W3C has successfully published two normative documents with substantive overlapping text before that were generated from the same source (ie XPath 2.0 [1] and XQuery 1.0 [2]) and these documents went all the way to Recommendation status without anyone in the W3C community expressing any concern whether one should be more normative that the other.  In fact these two documents were a joint effort of two different W3C Working Groups (XSL WG and XML Query WG) that worked together to ensure that the common normative text worked for both documents.

Personally in think both the HTML5 spec and the author-only view which are obviously aimed at different audiences can both be normative and that the HTML WG can work on ensuring that there are no conflicts between the two documents.

/paulc

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xpath20-20070123/ 
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xquery-20070123/

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329


-----Original Message-----
From: Noah Mendelsohn [mailto:nrm@arcanedomain.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2011 6:06 PM
To: Jonas Sicking
Cc: Roy T. Fielding; James Graham; Paul Cotton; public-html@w3.org; www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Normative status of author-only view of the HTML5 specification



On 6/7/2011 5:48 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> So you are saying then that if they disagree the author view should be 
> the authoritative? Can we make sure to explicitly state so in the spec 
> if that is what people agree should be the case?

I wonder whether an alternative would be to state words to the effect: 
"These two specifications are generated from common base text and are intended to be entirely consistent. Both are normative and authoritative. 
With respect to any matters on which they (unexpectedly) disagree, there is a bug in at least one, and neither specification is authoritative with respect to the point(s) of disagreement. In such cases we expect to resolve the bug by publishing versions that are changed to be consistent.

I can live with Jonas' proposal, but this seems to me supierior because:

* It's important IMO (and the TAG's) that the author view be normative.

* Given the many important technical details covered only in the full view, it's equally important that it be normative.

(I'm speaking for myself here, not necessarily for the TAG, though I can of course check with them if you like).

Noah

Received on Wednesday, 8 June 2011 18:45:22 UTC