- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:15:19 +0000 (UTC)
On Wed, 10 Sep 2008, Manu Sporny wrote: > > There will, of course, be many more examples of the problem following > the same format as shown above. Is this what you had in mind for the > problem description? If so, give us some time and we'll be able to > refine that page in the coming months. That's indeed the kind of thing that would be helpful. It's also important to indicate why we think that authors will want to actually indicate the information here. For example, in the music case, do authors want to expose that information, or are we merely hoping they will? Ideally, evidence of browser vendors, browser extension authors, or authors working around the lack of a feature is the kind of evidence we need to demonstrate a need. For example, are there browsers that are implementing <audio> in a way that hoks into iTunes? Or are there extension authors that support a custom class attribute that interacts with WinAmp? Or has Amazon looked for a mechanism to transfer purchases into media libraries other than using their download tool? Would they actually use a mechanism if we provided it? How would such a mechanism work, and would it be well-defined enough to handle things like resumable downloads, financial transactions, and individualised MP3s interoperably? Basically we need to show that we are addressing real needs and not just abstracting out what looks to us like common elements to multiple problems and providing a single generic mechanism that doesn't actually usefully solve the real problems. The same reasoning is why HTML has a bunch of explicit data types for its form <input> controls instead of having a generic type system like XML Schema and letting <input> controls be invented for any type. While the latter, with user agents dynamically creating form controls on the fly, would be a much more generic solution and would satsify the computer science abstraction aesthetic, it turns out to really not be what authors want, and at the end of the day an explicit but closed set of types ends up satisfying the bulk of authors much more. Although it doesn't solve all the problems that a generic system does, it solves the 80% case better, and that is what matters. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2008 13:15:19 UTC