[whatwg] Tim BL's HTML WG announcement and WHAT WG

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Sat, 28 Oct 2006 19:57:18 +0900, Lachlan Hunt  
<lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:

> ...  However, a frightening thought just struck me.
>
> Could it mean that the W3C isn't going to use WF2 directly, but rather  
> push ahead with Dave Ragget's Forms Lite proposal [1]?  There seems to  
> be significant discussion about it going on at www-forms [2].  The  
> proposal seems to throw out much of the WF2 work (including some  
> explicitly because of Opera's existing implementation), in favour a very  
> much corrupted version that is somehow attempting to integrate with  
> XForms.

The idea is that the browser developers participate, and that the entire  
group specify "what makes sense...". I think everyone involved is very  
clear that WF2 is an important basis (although W3C would be unlikely to  
simply adopt it as-is, and I would be opposed to them saying in advance  
that they will accept whatever comes out of WHATWG).

There was at least one major issue in WF2 that came out from actually  
*implementing*. *Possibly* there are others lurking in corners. Opera has  
an interest in the work that has gone into WF2, already proposed WF2 to  
the Web Application Formats group as a work item and wants to see an  
evolutionary approach to forms that doesn't bloat footprint and meets real  
needs without needlessly breaking other use cases and requirements.

So what comes out will probably be a (perhaps evolved) version of WHATWG  
stuff, as has been the case in some other W3C groups already. Of course,  
it is hard to predict *exactly* what will happen when implementors  
actually sit down and start to work seriously.

>> Or will the WHAT WG activities continue with an endorsement from the  
>> W3C?

I would be very surprised. As Tim notes, the WHATWG doesn't have what he  
calls "accountability measures" (by which I think he means a process with  
more of the checks and balances that are found in W3C's), which would make  
it hard for W3C to endorse anything WHATWG have yet to do. But there is  
plenty of work that I expect to be copied into W3C work. This has already  
happened in lots of cases. I also expect work to be done in a way that  
keeps it reasonably open to participation in the way that WHATWG is -  
something that happens with varying frequency in W3C groups.

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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chaals at opera.com          Try Opera 9 now! http://opera.com