Mike Schinkel wrote:
The lesser problems (20%) are that it will take time for reasonably good ones to evolve, and many will be subtly incompatible because of a variety of reasons: a.) lack of complete understand of the spec, b.) time-to-market concerns, c.) belief that full compatibility is not worth the expense, and/or d.) poor programmer skillls.
As someone in the process of implementing a HTML5 parser from the spec, my _only_ complaint so far is that there aren't (yet) any testcases. The spec is very clearly written and structured in such a way that it can be converted almost directly to code (of course, not all implementers will want to use the exact architecture this implies).
True, but on Windows servers you can't write ISAPI without C++, and Windows will continue to be a large market. In other cases, pure-dynamic language implementations are too slow to be viable. Put references to implementations in the spec, and the web hosts will use it.
The spec shouldn't contain references to implementations. However the wiki should contain such a list (see http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations ).
-- "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
