Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Perry Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
I'm somewhat frustrated right now. I hope this email is not too caustic.
The page at http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ causes my
Firefox to freeze for a minute or more. Eventually it recovers and it has
all the pretty do-dads and things but it sure is painful to wait. And, this
may be a Firefox problem but every time I hit a link, it freezes again as it
recomputes (I guess) all the pretty do-dads and things. The pretty do-dads
and things just are not worth it to me. Maybe there is something I can turn
off but not until after the first wait period.
Second, I downloaded the PDF (the html-letter.pdf) and various tools (like
Acrobat reader) complain when I try to reflow the document.
Third, if I save the page above to my disk and open it with dreamweaver and
try to make it in to an xhtml document, it dies. The reason I'm trying to
do that is some html to pdf converters insist upon xhtml format.
My ultimate goal (which I have now determined is hopeless) is to put these
documents on my "nook" so I can read them. Putting the html-letter pdf on
my nook "works" but has many UI issues. I thought if I could redo the
formatting somehow it might be nicer. Which leads to my final question or
request.
Can the original source of this, whatever it is stored in, be posted as
well? There is a comment somewhere that says the W3 version and the whatwg
version comes from the same source. It might allow energetic folks to offer
other formats of the books such as in epub format or some other eReader
style format.
The HTML5 spec serves, in addition to its role as a spec document, the
additional role of a UA stress test. It is a massive document with
several scripts running over it on load. Some browsers and systems
can handle it. None of the browsers on my computer can do it well
(I'm using a laptop from 2003, though, so my hardware is definitely
out-of-date).
To accommodate people like you and me, we have a multi-page version of
the spec, where each page is much smaller and more easily handleable.
You can reach it at whatwg.org/html5.
Another thing that might help you is to turn off the the scripts
running on the full spec. You can do that with some undocumented
query parameter, but I forget what it is. This will turn off some
things like the commenting system and the implementation statuses, but
it will usually allow a modern browser to handle the full spec
document.
if (location.search == '?slow-browser')
return;
And even better, quoting the release notes of Mozilla Developer Preview
(1.9.3 alpha) [1]: "Loading the HTML5 specification no longer causes
very long browser pauses. See bug 526394 [2] for details."
[1] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/devpreview/releasenotes/
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526394
~TJ
klaus
