I'd reply to your comments, Henri, but evidently my emails are not
welcome, and are considered, now what were the words? Oh yes,
"shrillness" and "hyperbole".
Interesting how "shrill" is used when women communicate in tech
discussions. About as interesting as statements about it being more cost
effective just to hire someone from a third world country to read to the
blind, rather than implement accessibility for the web.
Shelley
Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Oct 2, 2009, at 19:41, Shelley Powers wrote:
Henri Sivonen wrote:
It seems to me this needs to be assessed in the context of use
cases. It would help to know what kind of state editor vendors
would like to save, what mechanisms they use now and what state
saving they recall they have foregone due to lack of syntax in HTML.
A use case was provided. I added to it. If you don't find it
sufficient, feel free to reject.
A general class of use cases was provided but no concrete cases
that'd allow solutions to be evaluated.
What do you mean by "concrete"?
A specific example of what kind of state an HTML editor tool wants to
save.
No, I didn't say that RDFa is a decentralized extensibility, by itself.
OK. For clarity, are you saying that RDFa *isn't* "a decentralized
extensibility"?
And that is a good form of openness, though as you say, not without
its own challenges. But, that's more of a application extensibility
rather than a markup extensibility. Yes, HTML has object, but
that's so browsers could be extended with additional functionality.
This proposal is talking about extensibility at the core level, in
the markup, itself.
Frankly, two different things.
[...]
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're saying here. Could
you rephrase it?
How is an ActiveX control that hooks to <object> and a byte stream
different *from the user point of view* than an ActiveX control that
hooks into "custom tags" in IE? In both cases, there's content out
there that you can't read in your browser without installing an
additional piece of software, and the piece of software isn't
available for all browsers on all platforms.
Henri, sorry, I'm probably being particularly dense today, but I'm
not sure how this is related to the Microsoft proposal.
IE today allows ActiveX controls implement rendering of "custom tag"
subtrees. I'm interested in understanding the relationship of that
feature to the proposal.
How does the Web become better if additional pieces of native-code
software hook to the DOM in addition to hooking to <object>/<embed>
and a byte stream?
Native code software?
Code implemented as instructions native to the CPU. The way NPAPI
plug-ins and ActiveX controls are implemented.
Well, when it comes to namespaced elements in SVG in an HTML
document, I can see immediate benefit to JS libraries accessing those
elements.
SVG is not a "decentralized" extension to HTML, AFAICT. It's
centralized right here at the W3C together with HTML.
So, let's ignore the implementation details and focus on your
concerns about decentralized extensibility. Is your concern, then,
that no one has provided an argument you can agree with that
decentralized extensibility is needed? You did question Tony's
proposal, but I didn't see you question the assertions in the
proposal about the need for extensibility, only specific use cases.
What exactly do you have against decentralized extensibility? If you
can list out the specifics, perhaps we could discuss them, one by one.
I can't agree or disagree on whether 'decentralized extensibility' is
needed and I can't say what I have (if anything) against it without
knowing what 'decentralized extensibility' is. It would be helpful to
have a necessary and sufficient definition of what language
characteristics constitute 'decentralized extensibility'.
Is the set of characteristics a proper subset of the characteristics
of Namespaces in XML or are the sets one and the same?
* When content depends on language extensions that need client
software extensions to process, the ability of users to read Web
content is harmed in software/hardware environments for which the
client software extensions aren't available.
I would say that a significant proportion of HTML5 falls into the
category of needing implementation that isn't universally available
in all environments.
As far as I know, the HTML5 spec is royalty-free and it's being
implemented in multiple engines some of which are Open Source. There
doesn't seem to be any one party controlling the availability of an
HTML5 implementation for a given computing platform.
* Working with string tuple identifiers is harder than working with
simple string identifiers.
Again, this has nothing to do with your concern about decentralized
extensibility. I think we should focus on the most significant
concern, address it, and then move on to implementation once past
that initial concern. Don't you think?
It depends on whether 'decentralized extensibility' is synonymous with
Namespaces.
* Prefix-based indirection (where the prefix expands to something as
opposed to being just a naming convention) confuses people.
Again, outside of the initial concern about decentralized
extensibility as a whole.
It depends on whether 'decentralized extensibility' is synonymous with
Namespaces.
