Re: [W3C Webmob] Profiles?

On Wednesday, January 22, 2014 at 5:25 PM, Natasha Rooney wrote:

> 
> 
> > Sorry, can you clarify what you mean by profiles? I'm not sure what that is.
> 
> Lists of standards that something must adhere to. So, mobile browsers should have adhered to all the standards detailed on the "Coremob" profile.
 
Oh, please please please no! Please let's not do that. Those silly lists are really unhelpful and constantly fall out of date (and are actually harmful in that they put a ceiling on what standards are to be supported by user agents). WAC tried to do this and it failed miserably, and so have a whole bunch of other organizations that don't get the Web. 

One of the main reasons why we have living standards now is to put an end to profiles - i.e., the platform wants to be constantly updated (a platform that accesses constantly updating applications but can't update itself can only harm the Web... as legacy browsers once did before folks moved to an evergreen development model - but we are still seeing how toxic non-updating browsers can be in Android 2.3 and old version of Windows where people are stuck on IE8... poor souls). 

Profiles encourage people to reference dated/versioned specs (very bad!), which are what stagnate the Web. Instead, for example, if one references WHATWG HTML, it means "keep up with this living and always improving thing". That's much better and how the Web really works (or, ideally, how we want it to work).

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 2014 19:40:04 UTC