[whatwg] Provding Better Tools (was: Re: 9.1.2.1: trailing slash and atheism)

[James Graham]

Mike Schinkel wrote:

> The lesser problems (20%) are that it will take time for reasonably good
> ones to evolve, and many will be subtly incompatible because of a variety of
> reasons: a.) lack of complete understand of the spec, b.) time-to-market
> concerns, c.) belief that full compatibility is not worth the expense,
> and/or d.) poor programmer skillls.

As someone in the process of implementing a HTML5 parser from the spec, my 
_only_ complaint so far is that there aren't (yet) any testcases. The spec is 
very clearly written and structured in such a way that it can be converted 
almost directly to code (of course, not all implementers will want to use the 
exact architecture this implies).

> True, but on Windows servers you can't write ISAPI without C++, and Windows
> will continue to be a large market. In other cases, pure-dynamic language
> implementations are too slow to be viable. Put references to implementations
> in the spec, and the web hosts will use it.

The spec shouldn't contain references to implementations. However the wiki 
should contain such a list (see http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Implementations ).

-- 
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
  -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead