[whatwg] Section 1.4: Editorial: Avoid passive voice

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Thu Aug 13 17:48:05 PDT 2009


On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>
> Section 1.4 currently states:
> 
> Work on HTML 5 originally started in late 2003, as a proof of concept to 
> show that it was possible to extend HTML 4's forms to provide many of 
> the features that XForms 1.0 introduced, without requiring browsers to 
> implement rendering engines that were incompatible with existing HTML 
> Web pages. At this early stage, while the draft was already publicly 
> available, and input was already being solicited from all sources, the 
> specification was only under Opera Software's copyright.
> 
> In early 2004, some of the principles that underlie this effort, as well 
> as an early draft proposal covering just forms-related features, were 
> presented to the W3C jointly by Mozilla and Opera at a workshop 
> discussing the future of Web Applications on the Web. The proposal was 
> rejected on the grounds that the proposal conflicted with the previously 
> chosen direction for the Web's evolution.
> 
> Active voice would be more forceful and possibly more accurate here.

The choice of the passive voice was intentional here, to avoid making this 
paragraph about who was involved, but instead keeping it about the work.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



More information about the whatwg mailing list