RE: Proposed split of the HTML specification

CC-ing a few folks that I forgot :-/

-----Original Message-----
From: Travis Leithead 

Hi Robin!

I grabbed Erika, and together we reviewed this breakup plan in detail. In general, we are optimistic about where this is going. Below is our consolidated feedback.

Taking an editor-centric perspective, we would want to organize / optimize around:
1. Making progress on less-stable areas (e.g., merging interactivity elements / attributes and User Interfaces)
2. Ease of maintenance for stable areas (e.g., combining tables and lists until they otherwise require separate specs) 

. . . And then for implementers and the community, devise some sort of indexing service to provide equivalent functionality of WHATWG find on page and to indicate cross-link dependencies.

Sections we thought were spot-on (had the right balance of content):
* Core Algorithms
* Rendering HTML
* Application Cache
* Drag & Drop
* HTML Editing - Great baseline for future editing work (might eventually merge with some of the Editing TF's current work?)
* HTML Canvas
* HTML Template
* HTML Forms
* Sortable Tables
* Styling HTML
* HTML Metadata
* HTML Linking
* HTML Edits (propose a better name: HTML Change Tracking Elements?)
* HTML Embedding
* HTML Media
* HTML ARIA Integration
* HTML MathML Integration
* HTML SVG Intergation - Lots of future work here :)
* Obsolete HTML Features

Specific commentary on some of the other proposed breakout sessions:

_HTML_
* We felt that this could be expanded slightly by integrating some content from the other sections that felt better expressed in the opening document. Namely:
** Section 1 from both the "HTML Syntax" and "XHTML Syntax" documents

_Browser Object Model_
* Want to remove Scripting section and move to the "Scripting HTML" document to keep all scripting together.
 
_Core Attributes_
* Remove 'dir' and send to new doc as described below.

_HTML Syntax_
* Move out the first section into top "HTML" document, keep the rest.
* Rename to "HTML Parsing and Serialization" ('cause it has a nice familiar ring to it :-)

_XHTML Syntax_
* Same as above, but rename to "XHTML Parsing and Serialization"

_Scripting HTML_
* We thought this should include the section on Scripting (7) from the Browser Object Model document.

_HTML Best Practices_
* Want to move that up to the main HTML document. It will likely be updated frequently, just as the "HTML" document may need to be for managing the indexing and syntax descriptions. Seems like a better place to start than in a separate doc.

We thought these sets of documents would be better combined given their stability and similarities:

* HTML Tables + HTML Lists
* The Structure of HTML + Sections in HTML + HTML Blocks -- though not sure how to name this
* HTML Figures + HTML Images -- Better together, used often together in examples, etc.
* HTML Bidirectional Algorithm Requirements + BDO/BDI (from HTML Text) + dir (from Core Attributes) = new spec: HTML Bidirectional Text -- keep it all together for ease of update/review.
* HTML User Interfaces + HTML Interactivity Attributes (these belong together). Keep HTML User Interfaces as a top-level doc. 
* Merge "Browsing the Web" with Browser Object Model document. -- these combine the mechanics of browsing with the rest of the browsing objects.

Thanks!
Travis & Erika

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@w3.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 2:17 AM
To: HTML WG (public-html@w3.org)
Subject: Proposed split of the HTML specification

Hi all,

as part of the many discussion about the next steps in HTML, the 
question of splitting up the HTML spec has come up again. In order to 
make the discussion simpler, I have made:

     1) A tool that makes it easy to generate splits.

     2) A proposed split to get the discussion rolling.

The idea isn't that my proposed split is perfect; the idea is however 
that people who want to propose alternatives ought to do so by actually 
producing one rather than arguing about it. Smaller tweaks to an 
existing split should be made as pull requests against it.

The DIY breakup is up at:

     https://github.com/darobin/breakup


I encourage you to actually read the README.

The proposed split is up at:

     http://darobin.github.io/breakup/specs/


Some things worth noting about it:

   • I like smaller specs, it's a lot of pieces.

   • The generated output is not perfect, there are notably problems 
with WebIDL and references. The goal here is to give a concrete idea, 
not to produce perfect documents.

   • The chunking at times cobbles together section that weren't 
adjacent in the monolith, which can cause strange transitions. Overall 
there are wording nits, these can be ironed out *after* (and if) a split 
has happened.

   • Some content is just dropped on the floor. The list of dropped 
sections is in the JSON.

   • Cross-linking *ought* to work, but I haven't extensively tested it, 
bug reports welcome.

Go have fun! :)

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

Received on Monday, 22 June 2015 21:31:25 UTC