[whatwg] Re: Is this introducing incompatibilities with future W3C work

[Jim Ley]

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 17:58:36 +0000 (UTC), Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> | Namespace proliferation is a problem. Even fairly modest documents now
> | require a huge raft of declarations at the top. As the author of an
> | O'Reilly book on XForms, I can report that 90% of the technical
> | questions from readers involve confusion related to namespaces.
> - http://www.w3.org/2004/04/webapps-cdf-ws/papers/verity.html

Interesting, as that's not my experience in other XML languages, even
when introducing RDF to users don't seem to have that problem, and
they're positively crazy with me, I guess we're just looking at
different users.

> IE6 is only a concern because compatibility with IE6 is a concern of Web
> authors. The main motivation of WF2 (and all of WHATWG) is authors.

Right, Then I think it would be good if you could get some Authoring
Tool companies on board, they'll have useful things to say I'm sure.
> > no-one's yet explained how HTML 4 and XHTML 1 really create a migration
> > path, could you explain now perhaps?
> 
> XHTML 1.0 appendix C claims to describe such a migration path. 

Yes, but it doesn't - so I guess you're conceding there isn't one -
why not just an HTML vocabulary though (then you don't need to pollute
namespaces you don't control)

> > Yes, but you've still not told us the roadmap
> 
> * Publish WF2 snapshot this weekend.
> * Iterate WF2 until we agree it is as good as we're going to get it
>  without real-world experience.
> * Create WF2 test suite.
> * Create WF2 experimental implementations, to obtain implementation
>  feedback.
> * Update the spec based on implementation feedback.
> * Submit WF2 to standards organisation as basis for HTML extensions.

Great, any idea how long this might take?  CSS 2.1 timescales?

Jim.