- From: <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
- Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:19:42 -0400
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
Henri Sivonen wrote: > In reference to: > http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2008/09/23-minutes > > The minuted discussion mentions "clean" and "not-clean" several times > and separating them. > > What kind the of separation was meant in the discussion? I apologize for the delay in replying to this. In any case, I've had some chats with Ian at the Technical Plenary, and these have helped me to clarify what my concerns are. While I expect Ian is not prepared to endorse my suggestions at this point, or not all aspects of them in any case, he encouraged me to set them down for the record in a note to the public-html-comments list, and I have done so at [1]. To directly answer your question, Henri, the kind of separation I meant in the TAG's discussion is the one suggested in [1]. I understand that to some extent there is already an intention to produce a separate "Authoring Specification" that is somewhat similar to what I propose, and I'm glad that's being considered. I would prefer that such a specification be viewed not as an "authoring specification" but as "The HTML 5 Language Specification", I.e. a document that's of equal interest whether you are writing or reading an HTML 5 document. It would allow you to answer two questions: 1) is this a legal HTML 5 document? and 2) if yes, what does this document mean? If automatic extraction of the pertinent bits from the current drafts produces a first class exposition of such language specification, that's great, but I have some suspicion that a far cleaner, smaller, and easier to read specification could be written either by hand, or by careful manual adaptation of the current work. I do not expect that this specification would cover matters such as asynchronous execution of Javascript, or the intermediate states that a DOM goes through while, say, document.writes have inserted a start <tag> without yet the corresponding end </tag>; those details would remain in the existing larger specification. So, the net result of the proposed separation would be two documents: 1) The HTML 5 Language Specification (as proposed above) 2) The HTML 5 Browser Specification - this would provide essentially the information in the current drafts, except that unnecessary duplication with (1) would be avoided. In particular, this specification would explain that many of the user agents used on the Web, informally the ones we consider to be full function browsers such as Firefox, IE, Opera, etc., provide (or aim to provide) compatible interoperation on inputs and runtime details that go beyond those described in the HTML 5 language specification. This is the specification for building interoperable document interpretation and scripting functions in such browsers. Of course, when a legal HTML 5 document is received, the browser behavior must be consistent with the language specification, and indeed the Browser Specification should point to the Language Specification for matters such as the semantics of particular tags. Thank you. Noah [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2008Oct/0003.html -------------------------------------- Noah Mendelsohn IBM Corporation One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 1-617-693-4036 --------------------------------------
Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2008 09:20:33 UTC