- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 07:15:01 +0900
- To: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Cc: 'Jeff Jaffe' <jeff@w3.org>, 'Chris Wilson' <cwilso@google.com>, 'fantasai' <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>, 'W3C TAG' <www-tag@w3.org>, 'David Singer' <singer@apple.com>, 'Florian Rivoal' <florian@rivoal.net>
On Sunday 2019-09-15 13:04 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
> and a thread starting with Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/mdubinko/status/1077654386766008320
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> @mdubinko: Hot take: the insanely complicated HTML5 spec that WHATWG demanded, leads to the inevitable consequence of making all but a few implementations unviable. Hence Edge -> Blink. Hotter take: the XHTML modularization folks had it basically right, considering the long term.
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> See follow-up by our director
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> https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/1106880655844143105
This twitter thread is confusing cause and effect.
The bulk of the complexity of the WHATWG HTML spec written around
2005 was the result of complexity that already existed in the Web
platform, and which implementations would have already needed to
implement if they wanted to interoperate with existing
implementations. It seems odd to blame that on those who wrote a
spec that improved the ability to gain interoperability and build
new interoperable implementations, rather than on the previous
decade-plus of work that built a substantial ecosystem around specs
that were too vague to reach interoperability (for example, by not
specifying error handling behavior when large amounts of content
clearly depended on it) and thus required substantial
reverse-engineering work to do so.
-David
--
𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂
𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
- Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
Received on Sunday, 15 September 2019 22:15:32 UTC