[whatwg] Fear of scope creep

[Olav Junker Kjær]

I'm a bit concerned by the apparent scope creep of WHATWG.

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?

regards
Olav Junker Kjær