- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:49:21 +0100
- To: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk>
- Cc: "Michael[tm] Smith" <mike@w3.org>, "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>, www-validator@w3.org
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: > Michael[tm] Smith wrote: > >> A non-misleading way to describe the validator would be to say it's a >> tool that's meant to conform as closely as possible to the >> document-conformance constraints in the HTML5 specification. Real >> objective requirements, in a real W3C specification that's been a W3C >> specification for 5 years now and that is in fact the current W3C >> specification for HTML. > > Confused, Mike : the W3C site clearly says (apropos of HTML 5) > >> This is a work in progress! For the latest updates from the HTML WG, >> possibly including important bug fixes, please look at the editor's >> draft instead. There may also be a more up-to-date Working Draft with >> changes based on resolution of Last Call issues. > > So if HTML 5 is a work-in-progress, and if (as the specification > itself says) the specification is a /draft/ specification, then > I am unclear how it can also be "the current W3C specification > for HTML". Surely the latter must be a full specification, not > a draft, in which case it must be the HTML 4.01 specification which > is (as far as I can tell) the last HTML (as opposed to XHTML) > specification to have achieved full recommendation status. You could interpret the phrase "current W3C specification for HTML" in various ways, not least because it is not terminology formally defined by the W3C Process. The W3C Process says: "Working Groups generally create specifications and guidelines that undergo cycles of revision and review as they advance to W3C Recommendation status." http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/process.html Note it does not say that that documents aren't W3C specifications until or unless they become W3C Recommendations. In the common language usage of "current", the HTML5 editor's draft is the W3C's most current HTML specification. W3C's current Recommendation, on the other hand, remains HTML 4.01. Assuming that the primary goal of the HTML5 checker is to help (especially inexperienced) authors produce interoperable HTML documents, the relevance of the Recommendation status of features is vastly lower than their implementation status because Recommendation status has only a weak correlation with interoperability. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Monday, 30 July 2012 20:50:11 UTC