Call four comments 4 is out (Was: [whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 submission to W3C)

Wed Apr 13 02:31:24 PDT 2005

On Wed, 13 Apr 2005, Dean Jackson wrote:
> > 
> > Ok. Could you provide us with a list of features you believe need use 
> > cases listed? That would be really helpful in creating such a 
> > document.
> 
> All of them.

That's never going to happen, just like the XHTML working group has never 
published a document with use cases for all their features. Ditto the SVG 
group, the CSS group, and so forth. Most of the features have quite 
obvious use cases -- for example the use case for the first feature in the 
Web Apps draft -- <html> -- is having a predictable root element for the 
document or document fragment.

I can maybe find the time to produce a document summarising the use cases 
for the less obvious features (probably by simply copying the text from 
e-mails in the archives of this mailing list, where the features mostly 
originated), but I don't want to waste time doing so for dozens of 
features where the use cases are obvious and nobody disagrees.

> For example, I see many new HTML elements in (the strangely named) Web 
> Applications 1.0 for which I'd like to see the requirements. If only to 
> understand why you chose a different approach than the W3C HTML Working 
> Group (eg. maybe you are trying to solve a different use case and 
> therefore have a different requirement).

The two different requirements are "backwards compatibility" and "well 
defined error handling / processing model". I expect every difference in 
the details of common features can be traced down to those two things.

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