- From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
- Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:13:12 +0100
- To: www-archive@w3.org
- Cc: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
It's unfortunate that non-normative text consumes so much decision making effort. It's even more unfortunately that it consumes "convergence" effort. Of course, examples can have influence, so it's not totally bonkers to care about the e.g., stylistic aspects of them. Examples also grow stale, though this is less of a problem with the WHATWG draft as it's continually updated. It strikes me that there is a technical fix to this particular situation, if we agree that a large variety of examples from many perspectives is valuable. There's no reason that the examples have to be a fixed part of the text. Instead, one could allow for the submission of arbitrary examples from arbitrary people and add controls to the document to include and filter the examples. The example pool could allow for ranking, voting, and tagging. That plus a bit more metadata (person and date come to mind) would allow for a really nice experience. I could ask for the spec with anti-patterns, with Ian-examples, with examples submitted within the last year, with examples from such and such a text, with "pitfall" examples, and so on. Example boxes could have search or carousel buttons so I could explore many examples on demand. Since people would be encouraged to submit, rate, and otherwise contribute examples, it would provide a nice affordance to review the spec in a fine grained, yet engaged, way. Similarly, it would allow many people to write examples that express their perspectives on e.g., style, or even the content of the spec. This might channel energy into productive work rather than a direct power struggle. For example, it seems much more interesting to have additional examples of the form: <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>Flash test page</title> </head> <body> <p> <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"> <param name=movie value="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/triggerpages_mmcom/flash.swf "> This page requires the use of a really awesome technology. Since you have not installed the software product required to view this page, possibly because you are in the grip of Steve Job's bizarre vendetta against the real, aka, Flash-using, Web, you should try ditching your glass brick and getting a reasonable phone. </object> </p> </body> </html> than to have *debate* whether a certain example is appropriate or only having anodyne examples. (Note, I don't share the sentiment expressed by this hacked example :)) Just a thought. Cheers, Bijan.
Received on Sunday, 27 June 2010 23:13:44 UTC