[whatwg] One document or two?

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Aryeh Gregor<Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> I don't think alternative style sheets are evil; in fact, they seem to be
>> quite within the architecture of the Web. Surely you don't think that,
>> e.g., GMail is evil for having the same URL for whether your contact list
>> is hidden or expanded.
>
> I can't give other people links to my Gmail URLs anyway, since they
> don't know my password (I hope).  On the other hand, if I'm reading
> the author version of HTML 5 and want to quote a portion of it to
> someone with a link, it would be rather confusing if they said "Hey,
> that's not what it says!"  Publicly-viewable *documents* -- not
> necessarily applications which may have no stable state anyway --
> whose *contents* -- not UI -- differ as dramatically as this should
> have different URLs.  That's how documents on the web have always
> worked, and that's what people expect.

They do:

  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/?style=complete
  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/?style=author
  http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/?style=highlight

It's just that the url
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ refers to specific
resource based on the value of a cookie.  The resources themselves are
directly linkable, however.

~TJ