Re: Invitation to the TAG to provide feedback on HTML5

On Wed, 21 May 2008, Dan Connolly wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > 
> > It has come to my attention that the TAG prefers explicit requests for 
> > review rather than considering itself invited along with everyone else 
> > when a public draft is written,
> 
> Well, we're happy to look at specific architectural issues in any 
> work-in-progress in and around W3C, but otherwise, we don't expect 
> anything beyond being invited along with everyone else. And we don't 
> typically review specs -- especially specs as large as the HTML 5 draft 
> -- unless we're aware of architectural issues.

Ah, interesting. In that case let me ask for review for the following 
areas that are introducing major architectural features:

 * The use of the DOM as a basis for defining the language

 * The concept of browsing contexts

 * The distinction between Ua requirements and authoring requirements

 * The use of imperative definitions rather than abstract definitions with 
   the requirement of black-box equivalence in implementations

 * The new content model concepts (replacing HTML4's block and inline 
   concepts)

 * The focus on accessibility as a built-in concept for new features (such 
   as irrelevant="", <progress>, etc) instead of an add-on (like alt='').

 * The focus on defining the semantics in detail (e.g. the outline 
   algorithm, replacing the vague semantics in HTML4).

 * <event-source>

 * <datagrid>

 * <menu>/<command>

 * Origin

 * Offline Web application caches

 * The definition of the browsing context "navigation" algorithm and the 
   related session history traversal algorithms

 * The content-type sniffing and character encoding sniffing

 * The very explicit definition of a parser

 * The two structured storage features

 * The contentEditable feature and the UndoManager feature

 * The Drag and Drop and Copy and Paste architecture

 * postMessage

 * The new sandboxing features for <iframe>

I'm sorry the list is so long, but HTML5 really does introduce a lot of 
major new architectural concepts. I would not want the TAG to feel like 
these concepts came out of nowhere next year when we finally go to Last 
Call, as happened with the ARIA issue -- it may be very, very hard to make 
changes at that point, since implementations are developing at the same 
time as the spec, and it would be sad if the TAG's collective vast 
experience was to end up being ignored because we didn't ask for feedback 
soon enough.

Any input would be very welcome.

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

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2008 21:18:08 UTC