- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:21:08 +0100
- To: Aryeh Gregor <ayg@aryeh.name>
- Cc: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu>, "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Aryeh Gregor <ayg@aryeh.name> wrote: > As such, the only value I can see in having an HTML5 REC at all is the > patent policy. From a patent-policy perspective, we want to publish > as much material as possible as REC, as often as possible. [snip] > So I think we should get HTML5 to REC as fast as possible for patent > reasons, and continue using the WHATWG(/WHATCG) HTML draft for actual > implementation. Interesting point of view! Naive question to the floor from a non-lawyer. As I understand it, contributors to a royalty-free specification give up the right to make claims that the patents they hold are violated by implementing the normative requirements of the specification. Presumably if there are no implementations of a normative requirement that makes it harder to tell which of their patents might be violated and for contributors to estimate the cost of giving up their patent rights? Is this one of the motivations of the "two implementations" requirement? What is the minimum level of implementation needed to make judgements about likely patent violation? Could we have a more lightweight process for royalty-freeing bits or snapshots of spec? Some other audiences that needs consideration, but aren't mentioned in your feedback, are authors, people writing guidance for authors, and other spec writers (EPUB etc.). Information about the interoperable implementation status of features is critical for that audience. These audiences likely naively assume that features in RECs should work. If we push HTML to REC without implementations, I think we need to warn those audiences that the presence of features in the REC is no guarantee that they work! HTML-Next/Living Standard and the linter need to do a better job at highlighting implementation status. I agree adoption of a common test format could help provide better information here. Does Mozilla have a test harness for running the HTML test suite? -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Thursday, 16 August 2012 12:21:56 UTC