Re: html4 vs html5 and "superseded RECs" when there isn't a new REC

On 3/7/2012 7:03 AM, Carr, Wayne wrote:
> My original post was not issue 2 (what I was asking for was snipped out in what's below).   HTML4 isn't a superseded REC because html5 isn't a REC.   That was the point.  But, HTML5 is defacto the new html spec and it will take a very long time to get to REC even though it is widely implemented.  We should do something in the html4 REC to at least point to html5.
>
> The suggestion was to put a note in the HTML4 spec pointing to the latest html5 TR WD.  (and keeping that up to date is a different issue - but it's better than not indicating anything in the old and out of date official REC).

Having a hard time parsing issues and variations :(

Do you think this was captured by anything written in Steve Zilles' 
memo?  If not, would you like to recommend a general "issue" which can 
be worked by the AB?

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Charles McCathieNevile [mailto:chaals@opera.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2012 3:05 AM
>> To: Carr, Wayne; Marcos Caceres
>> Cc: public-w3process@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: html4 vs html5 and "superseded RECs" when there isn't a new REC
>>
>> Note - this is ISSUE-2 - if you add that string in mails about the topic they will be
>> collected at
>> http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/2
>>
>> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:48:35 +0100, Marcos Caceres<w3c@marcosc.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wednesday, 7 March 2012 at 10:35, Carr, Wayne wrote:
>>>> With HTML4 we have the formal W3C Recommendation for HTML, but no one
>>>> would want that as the basis for a UA. It has been superseded by HTML5.
>>>> But, people still write that html4 is the html spec and html5 is in
>>>> the future. Obviously, that doesn’t reflect the Web Browsers out
>>>> there which have embraced html5. But html5 is still years away from
>>>> going to REC.
>>>>
>>>> It seems in this (hopefully) unusual situation,
>>> Just wondering, was it not the same case with CSS 2.1 (and now with
>>> many modules of CSS3)? And with XHR 1 and XHR level 2 also (with
>>> neither XHR version going to REC, while XHR 1 was abandoned in favour
>>> of just "XHR"…)
>> Yeah, I think the situation is actually quite common.
>>
>>> XHR level 2 was originally published under:
>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/XMLHttpRequest2/
>> ...
>>> What would be nice would be if HTML5 would dethrone the obsolete XHTML
>>> spec from the URI (and we dropped the "5" from the spec, as the WHATWG
>>> has done):
>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/html/
>> Actually, I think that is a far too simplistic approach to be useful, except to a small
>> handful of the stakeholders. And I think removing the version token from the spec
>> is not a helpful solution, as nice as it might feel.
>>
>> Having a pointer that describes the status of HTML at
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/html/ might be useful - and it might need to be more
>> complex than "latest draft, last 'heartbeat' publication, last Recommendation".
>> There are plenty of people who use XHTML. There are people who use HTML 4.
>> There are people who use HTML5. And there are people who use HTML and don't
>> actually know what they are using. If they want to look up "What is HTML" and
>> they expect W3C (instead of Wikipedia, about.com, or their local library's CD-
>> ROM encyclopedia of the Web) to explain it, we should think about how to
>> provide different bookmarkable references for the different needs.
>>
>> (Which also feeds into the bibliographic references discussion Marcos kicked off a
>> while ago. Did that result in any issues, actions, or
>> conclusions?)
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> Chaals
>>
>> --
>> Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
>>      je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
>> http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Friday, 9 March 2012 00:43:12 UTC