[whatwg] Fear of scope creep

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
>
> I'm a bit concerned by the apparent scope creep of WHATWG.

Understandable.


> The charter of WHAT <http://whatwg.org/charter> says: "The goal of the 
> Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group is to address the 
> need for one coherent development environment for Web applications, 
> through the creation of technical specifications that are intended to be 
> implemented in mass-market Web browsers."
> 
> Right now most of the discussions on the WHAT mailing list concerns 
> extensions and clarification of the semantics of document-oriented HTML 
> elements, and discussions about the low-level syntax of HTML (DTD, SGML 
> etc.). "Web Applications 1.0" is apparently slowly turning into "HTML 
> 5".
> 
> This is all very good and certainly needed, however isn't there a danger 
> it is taking focus and resources away from the initial goal of the WG, 
> to build a common platform for web *applications*, as an open and 
> (potentially) widely implemented alternative to XUL, XAML etc?

There are basically two ways we can go:

 * Take HTML4 and DOM2 HTML as a base and only specify the changes.

 * Take HTML4 and DOM2 HTML as a base and specify the new language in its 
   entirety.

With Web Forms 2 we did the former. A lot of the feedback I've received, 
however, has been complaining about the fact that now people have to check 
two or three specs to work out how one feature should work.

Since our goal is specifically to create "one coherent development 
environment", I felt that this would be better served by going down the 
second road for the Web Apps draft. This also gives us the opportunity to 
fix all the problems HTML4 has.

I don't think this is particularly taking resources away from our goal; 
semantic markup should be a key part of any cross-media cross-platform 
application environment.

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