Re: Versioning and HTML

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009, Larry Masinter wrote:
> 
> Problem (from Chris Wilson): "the general problem with how we define 
> HTML today; if HTML5 becomes a Rec and we realize we did something 
> poorly we will cause rampant compatibility problems if we change 
> implementations. There are a whole bunch of versioning mechanism that 
> will address that but also cause their own problems."

Isn't this the problem the Candidate Recommendation stage is supposed to 
address? Having serious CR phases, where we aim for two complete 
implementations of the entire specification (including all optional parts, 
and with no bugs, and with a comprehensive test suite written with the 
intent of finding every last edge case bug) seems like it would avoid the 
problem of doing things poorly, or at least reduce the likelihood to the 
point where it would be rare enough to not be enough to justify adding 
syntax-level support for routing around such problems later.

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

Received on Sunday, 19 April 2009 08:30:36 UTC