Re: New resource: Normative References to W3C Standards

On 19/04/13 13:23, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Web standards change over time. HTML has, DOM has, CSS has, JavaScript
> has, HTTP has, encodings have, URLs have. Whether they were W3C REC,
> IETF STD, or even an ISO standard did not affect this one bit.

One thing has not: time constraints in the tangible industry.

> It seems your problem is not created by the living standard, but by
> the snapshot?

In this example, only partly.

> I don't think e.g. http://url.spec.whatwg.org/ is developed much
> faster than any other standards document. It's maintained better, but
> you still have to go through the same cycles.

WebSockets for instance?

> A feature does not change overnight. The change might be checked in
> overnight, but there is discussion and buildup leading up to that. And
> in the case of the WHATWG HTML specification such a feature would
> likely have already been flagged as unstable. This is no different
> from when the CSS WG, five years after it released Media Queries as
> Candidate Recommendation, clarified and changed parsing aspects
> drastically.

There is one big difference: CR is no "living standard". It's not
standard at all at that stage...

> You can take a snapshot, but it will not be stable. Whenever I hear

So that snapshot is pointless and useless.

> the concerns from Boeing et al raised it sounds to me more like they
> just want to freeze a single browser engine for a while and code their
> software to that. The problem for them is that the web is still
> evolving, more rapidly now than before. I think we can safely assume
> that the web rapidly evolving is not going to stop. So the problem
> Boeing et al need to solve is how to deal build their software stack
> on that unstable equilibrium.

I hope you understand that "solve" is a tremendously complex and
expensive task.

> They cannot have that. The W3C could continue to provide such fiction
> in forms of RECs, but reality is that most of those RECs have glaring
> holes and are not to be looked at.

I know your opinion, I read it in the TAG ftf minutes. But unless I
am completely mistaken, this thread is about W3C Standards, right?
So if you think W3C Standards are pointless and should be dropped, why
do you contribute to the debate anyway?

</Daniel>

Received on Friday, 19 April 2013 12:29:33 UTC