Re: Please explain the role of the W3C in the continuing development of HTML

On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, Nathan wrote:
> 
> The W3C timeline and model of releasing major versions "5" "6" is far 
> too slow, whilst the WHAT WG Living Standard is a constantly moving 
> target that the common web folk simply can't keep up with.
> 
> It would be great to see the two approaches balanced such that 
> announcements are made like "HTML has just been updated, features a,b 
> have been added, bugs h,j,k have been fixed and z has been deprecated".

Why do people want a specification of HTML with known bugs but without 
those bugs being fixed as soon as possible? Wouldn't referring to a 
specification with known bugs be harmful to interoperability?

HTML4 has known bugs, e.g. it gives the wrong default for the "media" 
attribute. Can you give an example of an organistation that refers to 
HTML4 and does not actually use the definition in today's HTML 
specification when it comes to the media="" attribute, but instead 
continues to use the known-wrong definition? (Or the same for any of the 
other bugs in HTML4 that we've since fixed.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 15 February 2011 20:17:59 UTC