Differences between WHATWG and W3C specs

There are many differences between the WHATWG and W3C HTML specs.

I’d like to pick a simple example, the <cite> element [1,2], to wonder
how useful maintaining two specs really is—and whether we on the W3C
side take the appropriate steps to keep such differences to a minimum?

To use the <cite> example, it doesn’t seem clear what the benefit is
to remove important parts like “A person's name is not the title of a
work” (I’ve just observed confusion on a WebAIM list [3]—the WHATWG
spec was clear about this), and I’d claim it’s not a good use of time
to change things like names (for example, Ian became Hillary).

In whose interest is this?

If there really is need for two specs, though I don’t want to open
this can here, what does the group think about limiting changes and
differences to what reflects insurmountable dispute between groups? Is
that something to embed in the group charter?


[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-cite-element
[2] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/text-level-semantics.html#the-cite-element
[3] http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id=24285


-- 
Jens O. Meiert
http://meiert.com/en/

Received on Friday, 20 September 2013 02:18:12 UTC