Re: Mozilla Proposal for HTML5 Spec Licence

On 15 April 2011 00:15, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Apr 2011, Danny Ayers wrote:
>> On 14 April 2011 22:20, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>> >
>> > For developer-facing non-normative documentation, the WHATWG is likely
>> > to continue using the term "HTML5" for some time, but it really has
>> > nothing to do with the W3C draft.
>>
>> I'm curious, and so hope you will answer a direct question - who gains
>> what from maintaining confusion through contradictory/ambiguous naming?
>
> Authors gain, by more quickly recognising the developers.whatwg.org
> document as what they are looking for. We (the WHATWG) try to minimise the
> confusion on this matter, by explaining pretty much at every turn what the
> terminology means and how it's used.

Ok, an author is looking for the HTML5 specification, they find
developers.whatwg.org which is titled "HTML5" and has the subheading
"About this specification", followed by a table of contents.

I think most people will (not unreasonably) assume that the table of
contents is the contents of the HTML5 specification. Many might not go
to the trouble of reading the introduction, and rather dive straight
in and start referring to the individual sections of the contents.

Is this HTML5?

>   http://developers.whatwg.org/introduction.html

Says yes. But then explains that: "This specification actually now
defines the next generation of HTML after HTML5." and goes on to list
the parts of this specification that aren't actually parts of HTML5.

So it is HTML5 and it isn't HTML5.

> So I hope you will agree that we're not "maintaining confusion".

Quite the opposite.

Cheers,
Danny.


-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Friday, 15 April 2011 08:58:40 UTC