Hi T.J.,
On 9 Jun 2010, at 15:57, T.J. Crowder wrote:
[snip]
What I wrote was:
FWIW, completely agree that there must be one specification for
HTML5. Unless the W3C is prepared to step back and let the WhatWG
take ownership, that spec must be "owned" by the W3C. Pages like
this one [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
multipage/] are very confusing. I've seen it cited in online
discussions as "the HTML5 standard" (and why shouldn't someone
think it was? It says "draft standard" on it).
The work of the WhatWG is extremely important, it has driven and
continues to drive this process forward where HTML had been under-
and mis-specified for years. That work needs to be credited and
honored, but as HTML5 is becoming the new baseline, there needs to
be a single definitive source of normative information about it,
with other sources of draft proposals (not standards, not
specifications)
You don't mean "not specifications" do you? It's hard to see how you
can propose something without providing a specification of what you
propose.
very, very clearly labelled as such.
Having a competing "specification" is a sure route to fracture and
failure. I hope no one wants that. Those of us relying on these
standards certainly don't.
There are two HTML 4 standards, the W3C "recommendation" and ISO/IEC
15445:2000(E):
http://www.scss.tcd.ie/misc/15445/15445.html
Some purists might insist that only the latter is a standard :), but
there are definitely two specifications. Now, editorially, the ISO
spec is a "diff by ref" spec, so there are some differences. But note
that the ISO spec is more restrictive than the W3C one.
If the WHATWG spec remains a superset, then I think the likely
*technical* fragmentation reasonably can be seen as fairly minimal.
Whether there are significant social/marketing issues, well, I guess
the real question is *how* significant they are. That I don't know.
People regularly get quite concerned about things like working drafts
and the messages they send and fait accomplis, etc. But I don't think
they tend to have widespread or severe negative effects.
Cheers,
Bijan.
