- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:01:31 +0000 (UTC)
On Sun, 9 Aug 2009, Aaron Boodman wrote: > > I frequently see the comment on this list and in other forums that > something is "too late" for HTML5, and therefore discussion should be > deferred. > > I would like to propose that we get rid of the concepts of "versions" > altogether from HTML. In reality, nobody supports all of HTML5. Each > vendor supports a slightly different subset of the spec, along with some > features that are outside the spec. > > This seems OK to me. Instead of insisting that a particular version of > HTML is a monolithic unit that must be implemented in its entirety, we > could have each feature (or logical group of features) spun off into its > own small spec. We're already doing this a bit with things like Web > Workers, but I don't see why we don't just do it for everything. > > Just as they do now, vendors would decide at the end of the day which > features they would implement and which they would not. But we should > never have to say that "the spec is too big". If somebody is interested > in exploring an idea, they should be able to just start doing that. I agree in principle. With HTML5, we had an anomalous event in that the HTML4 spec was unusable as a base, due to its woeful inadequacies in terms of precision in implementation requirements, and the large holes in terms of what the platform involves relative to what it specified. Moving forward, I would like to move to a model that is less tied to versions. I expect to start looking at this kind of thing next year. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Friday, 14 August 2009 04:01:31 UTC