Re: extensions to HTML

On Wednesday 2009-11-11 15:26 -0600, Dan Connolly wrote:
> I think Dave Baron's contribution to the HTML WG versioning issue
> is in the genre you describe (unless by "neutral" you mean
> "reviewed and endorsed by some group with mandate" in which case
> I don't know of any such writing; opinions vary widely in this space)
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/0279.html
>  <- http://www.w3.org/html/wg/tracker/issues/4
> 
> He doesn't give much in the way of details about syntax; I think
> the context of his message assumes that extensions will mostly
> be element names, attribute names, and attribute values... oh...
> and JavaScript properties and functions.
> 
> He recently updated/elaborated his thoughts in this space:
> 
> "There's been a debate in the HTML Working Group on distributed
> extensibility; this led to a session at the Technical Plenary yesterday
> (and, for me, an interesting lunch discussion afterwards that led me to
> think about issues I hadn't before thought much about). ..."
>   -- http://dbaron.org/log/20091105-distributed-extensibility

Hmmm.  I see the versioning and distributed extensibility
discussions as separate.  I think versioning is about centralized
extensibility:  how we plan for changes in future versions that we
expect to be implemented by a broad range of HTML tools.  I see the
distributed extensibility discussion as about extensions that are
expected to be used by smaller classes of HTML tools (i.e.,
generally just ignored by browsers or displayed according to CSS
handling of generic markup) and that could be combined in arbitrary
combinations.

If people want browsers to do more than that with distributed
extensions, there are much bigger problems to solve than just
namespace syntax (http://dbaron.org/cdi-req/ is a list I made in
late 2005 for dealing with just a relatively small set of known
vocabularies).

I thought that blog post was really the first comment I made in the
distributed extensibility discussion, and an updated version of the
first post you cite would actually be
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2009Aug/0054.html

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 22:07:38 UTC