Re: Reference to the HTML specification

On 5 Aug 2011, at 14:50, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-08-05 at 08:22 -0400, Arthur Barstow wrote:
>> On 8/4/11 11:47 AM, ext Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
>>> Several documents in the WebApps Working Group are linking to HTML, more
>>> specifically to the WHATWG HTML specification. An example of those is
>>> Progress Events. This is done for no reason than political as far as I
>>> can tell. This undermines and is disrespectful the work of the HTML
>>> Working Group. Unless the WebApps comes up with a set of good reasons of
>>> why this is done and convince the HTML Working Group, those references
>>> must be changed in order to publish the documents properly and respect
>>> the work of the HTML Working Group,
>> 
>> Philippe,
>> 
>> Re the specific case of the Progress Events spec - when it was last 
>> published it included non-normative references to both version of HTML:
>> 
>>   http://www.w3.org/TR/progress-events/#references
>> 
>> May we do that again? (I interpret that to mean the W3C has a fixed 
>> version of HTML and the WHATWG has a tip-of-the-tree version of HTML and 
>> as such, I don't think it  'disses the HTMLWG nor the W3C.)
> 
> Again, what are the reasons to link to the WHATWG HTML version?

If there is something you need that is not in the W3C spec, then it seems like a valid reason (e.g., PeerConnection API or some helpful concept).  

> What
> does it mean for the work of the HTML Working Group?

Egos aside, it should not mean anything… one has green headings, the other has blue ones. There are just two equally valid authoritative sources for the document. If both organisations can guarantee that the specification will be there tomorrow, then I don't see any issue. As an Editor, I just want my hyperlinks to work so people can implement my spec and get to the normative dependencies (personally, I chose the W3C version because it had everything I needed). If either the WHATWG or W3C vanish tomorrow, it's good that we have a fallback for this important work. 

> There are features
> in the WHATWG version that got rejected in the HTML Working Group. See
> 
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#how-do-the-whatwg-and-w3c-specifications-differ?
> 
> This list keeps growing.
> 
> I don't think it's appropriate for one Working Group to ditch the work
> of an other.

Both the W3C and WHATWG have an equal and legitimate authoritative claim over the content of the HTML specification (with real authoritative legitimacy being determined by which version actually gets implemented and by who).  

It should be left to the editor's (or working group) discretion as to which spec they cite regardless of the reason.  

Kind regards,
Marcos

Received on Friday, 5 August 2011 15:18:36 UTC