[whatwg] Fear of scope creep

[Brad Neuberg]

I agree with the comments on scope creep from Dean and Olav.  The 
discussion on the WHATWG list seems to be mostly about HTML and DOM 
semantics these days.  My understanding of the web app standard was that it 
would codify a set of useful tags and practices that developers might have 
already been using, such as the XmlHttpRequest object, and maybe introduce 
a bit more functionality and tags to make building these kinds of web apps 
easier.  Then, on IE, much of this would be implemented as an emulation 
layer using things like IE Behaviors and so on, similar to Deans work.  If 
the web app standard ends up specifying what is essentially an entirely new 
standard of HTML, like HTML 5, then I don't see it being possible to truly 
emulate on IE as well as being a pain in the butt to actually code (i.e. if 
it requires indepth knowledge of esoteric HTML and SGML issues to implement 
then I don't see it actually getting much uptake).  Plus, the more we 
emulate on IE the slower it will be; emulation layers in the browser can be 
slow if you aren't careful, plus they can have issues with dynamic updating 
of the DOM, like Dean's IE 5 layer.

Best,
   Brad Neuberg


At 05:51 AM 4/18/2005, Dean Edwards wrote:
>Olav Junker Kjær wrote:
>>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".
>
>I mentioned this a while back too. Part of the problem is that we aren't 
>submitting enough applications related topics. So it seems that all 
>discussion is around standard HTML. This may in turn be due to the fact 
>that we are currently publishing WF2 and (as a group) we haven't turned 
>our full attention on WA1. But you're right, I have a hundred outstanding 
>messages from the WHATWG list which all seem to nitpick existing HTML. 
>I'll probably mark them all as "read" without actually reading them.
>
>-dean
>

Brad Neuberg, bkn3 at columbia.edu
Senior Software Engineer, Rojo Networks
Weblog: http://www.codinginparadise.org

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