Re: [w3c/charter-html] Drop "DOM 4" or any copy/paste efforts (#145)

@marcoscaceres:

The specs are not mere copies. 

While browsers may or may not follow them (and by "no browser" do you mean that, or just "not the people I know"?), others do.

There are mismatches in specs precisely because we find that what we got from the period where there was a common spec doesn't match interoperable reality. This is the purpose of testing, of the Candidate Recommendation phase of the W3C process, and speaking personally a motivation behind most of the changes that I have made.

I'm not sure why you think the only way to demonstrate the spec reflects reality is through WPT, or what certain implementors read - while WPT in particular is very valuable, the fact that there isn't a test there for something isn't a proof that it doesn't happen.

Meanwhile, where there is interoperability, the copy/paste that happens between the two specs should probably be *enhanced* - it would be nice if the WHATWG spec were more inclined to adopt changes that match observable reality in old parts of the specs.

In any event the specs are different. While we have legacy content from the days when there *was* an upstream spec which was only ever fantasy or experiment, we are working to remove it, and not to add things that are still speculative.

Likewise, we have a more modular spec - so we can for example take the long-dormant microdata note, which appears not to have any traction among browser vendors but is a technology implementedf by major search engines and used by a massive proportion of real developers, and work on a Recommendation that matches reality, with the benefit of clear signalling through the status of the specification, and working as necessary with implementors to improve interoperability.

Where we do not do and do not expect to do work, we actively drop that from our deliverables - streams, URL, High-level events are examples, while we have explicitly noted that we're not sure if certain former deliverables such as the quota API are worth pursuing and will only take them up if convinced they are. That's a major point of this recharter, and of the W3C Process by which we charter Working Groups in the first place.

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