Re: Tag Soup (was: FW: XHTML)

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Murray Altheim wrote:

> What in the hell are you trying to  accomplish? 

Not to put too fine a point on it (I do *not* mean to impugn anyone), a
call for honest specs for HTML *as it is practiced*.

> What good does attempting to devalue attempts at cleaning up the mess
> out there really do for the community?

IMHO, "cleaning up the mess" is the wrong way to look at either what's
really going on out there or what's needed.  The Mess is *not* causeless;
it *can* be rationalized; rationalzing it is the way to put closure on it,
in the sense that people now know what it is, rather than feel that it's
some protean monster given that the existing specs patently *fail* to
acknowledge or account for it.

The Mess is here to stay.  The point is to develop *alternatives*.  The
first thing an alternative needs is to be distinguishable.  From what?  A
protean monster or an accurate description - those are the choices.

> Yes, the specs may be irrelevant 

To current practice, desperately in need of *some* formal description,
they are.

> and we're all misguided fools without a clue on a useless mission to
> create twisted specifications that nobody reads

I appreciate why you (and others on the various W3C working groups) are
put out, and I apologize for stating my case more strongly than was
politic.  But the fact is that you are *developing* specs, you are not
describing or formalizing current practice.  At the very least, the *fact
that there is a difference* needs to be brought out.

If I wrote up a spec for Tag Soup, could it be accepted as a Note?


Arjun

Received on Wednesday, 8 December 1999 19:04:58 UTC