[whatwg] some issues

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
>
> ...the WHAT WG members have refused to say which standards organisation
> they're taking it to (and as they're not members there's nothing
> stopping them from.)

The W3C doesn't distinguish between a company asserting intentions to
submit, and employees of that company asserting such intentions.

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, we don't know. There are good arguments
for several organisations.


>> 1) The time it takes to get feedback from a standards organization is
>> significantly reduced.
>
> There's no feedback from standards orgs being solicited in any of the
> specs at this time.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, could you explain?


>>    So do we tell everyone with web-enabled phones "tough luck"?
>
> Currently the spec only claims to extend HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, it
> makes no mention of XHTML Basic at all.  So that looks like what's
> happening...

The position paper that Opera and Mozilla wrote a few weeks ago and that
forms the much of the basis for this work points out that device-specific
profiles are a bad thing. Mobile devices should implement the same subset
of XHTML as desktop devices, otherwise we will have a fragmentation of the
Web, where large parts of the content aren't accessible to mobile UAs,
which seems pretty stupid. Thus, Web Forms 2.0 is designed to be
implementable on mobile UAs from the start, and no mobile-specific profile
is required.


> The problem comes when you're deciding how to implement things, I
> believe C Williams comments were suggesting that a vendor other than
> Opera/Safari/Mozilla could feel at a disadvantage because they don't
> know what's coming up in the next module of the specification that may
> heavily impact on how to design something.

Given that all of this is being done in public, I don't see how Mozilla
(for instance) could know what was coming up any more than anyone else.

We welcome anyone who wishes to participate.

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