After 5

Dear all,

HTML5 looks like it might possibly make it to Recommendation within a 
short time frame. This seems like a good time to open up a discussion 
about what to do next.

I have already circulated a proposal for high-level principles in this 
area (linked below) but rather than focus specifically on that I would 
like to suggest a variety of aspects I think we should take into account 
for this discussion:

# We can change pretty much everything

By this I mean: don't assume that the way things have worked in the past 
is representative of how they have to work in the future. You may have 
been told that some things can't be done that actually can be. You may 
have encountered barriers that can be lifted.

# Unhappiness is not a fatality

A lot of people are unhappy with the way in which standards, in 
particular HTML, are being conducted (here and elsewhere). It doesn't 
have to be this way. Please don't hesitate to bring up things that 
frustrate you with the current situation. In doing so, however, please 
try to be constructive.

# Don't be partisan

I frankly couldn't care less about your latest rant against the {WHATWG, 
W3C, Illuminati, latest Beyoncé album} and I don't think anyone does either.

# Developers

The Web developer community is incredibly smart, creative, and friendly. 
Overall, they care about standards a fair bit too. Yet when I look at 
how we're doing things (and in saying this I am casting a far broader 
net than just the HTML WG) I get the strong sense that if we had wanted 
to actually prevent this amazing reservoir of competence to contribute 
we could hardly have done a better job. That is something we should 
really fix.

# Doing more than talking

This is a standards mailing list. We can talk about how we ought to do 
things until cows evolve intelligences, build spaceships, explore the 
universe, and then come home. Of course, we do need to discuss things, 
but inasmuch as possible consider that code speaks louder than words. 
That is why I am starting to execute on the plan already even though the 
discussion has just started. It is not meant as a way of pre-empting 
decisions but on the contrary of facilitating it because as soon as I 
start putting code and specs up (very soon) that implement the new 
approach it can all be steered through contribution.


I outline further high-level details about how I propose we move forward 
here:

     http://darobin.github.io/after5/

Concerning the HTML split into parts, my hope is that we do it in such a 
way that makes the result more useful for developers while retaining 
implementer-level details, which in turn should help support further 
contributions.

WDYT?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Tuesday, 16 September 2014 12:03:19 UTC