[whatwg] Section 1.4: Editorial: Avoid passive voice

Section 1.4 currently states:

Work on HTML 5 originally started in late 2003, as a proof of concept
to show that it was possible to extend HTML 4's forms to provide many
of the features that XForms 1.0 introduced, without requiring browsers
to implement rendering engines that were incompatible with existing
HTML Web pages. At this early stage, while the draft was already
publicly available, and input was already being solicited from all
sources, the specification was only under Opera Software's copyright.

In early 2004, some of the principles that underlie this effort, as
well as an early draft proposal covering just forms-related features,
were presented to the W3C jointly by Mozilla and Opera at a workshop
discussing the future of Web Applications on the Web. The proposal was
rejected on the grounds that the proposal conflicted with the
previously chosen direction for the Web's evolution.

Active voice would be more forceful and possibly more accurate here.
For example,

???? started work on HTML 5 in late 2003,  as a proof of concept to
show that it was possible to extend HTML 4's forms to provide many of
the features that XForms 1.0 introduced, without requiring browsers to
implement rendering engines that were incompatible with existing HTML
Web pages. At this early stage, while the draft was already publicly
available, and input was already being solicited from all sources, the
specification was only under Opera Software's copyright.

In early 2004, Mozilla and Opera jointly presented some of the
principles that underlie this effort, as well as an early draft
proposal covering just forms-related features, to the W3C at a
workshop discussing the future of Web Applications on the Web. The W3C
rejected the proposal  on the grounds that it conflicted with the
previously chosen direction for the Web's evolution.

(I'm not sure who to fill in as the subject of the first sentence.)

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo at ibiblio.org

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 16:55:24 UTC