[whatwg] Client-side includes proposal

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, timeless wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > When you control the software used to read the data, it doesn't matter
> > what the data format is.
> 
> i kinda object to this. By this argument, <video> isn't necessary 
> because youtube controlled the software (flash) used to read their 
> videos. [...]

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Kristof Zelechovski wrote:
>
> Publishers who publish commercial content on physical media are rarely 
> interested in having their content repackaged by someone else as they 
> see fit.  This is not very pleasant of course; however, you could 
> possibly try to solve your problem by asking the vendor for a license to 
> repackage their content.

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 
> Who says you control the software used to read the data? I often want to 
> send documents around via e-mail, network mounts, ÇDs, and other 
> non-network means. I usually don't care and don't want to care what 
> platform or software is used to read those documents. I certainly don't 
> wnt to have to supply such software to people I'm communicating with. 
> HTML works very nicely for me here. Software independence is a very good 
> idea, and hardly unique to the Web.

My point is that all these use cases are out of scope for the WHATWG, 
which is specifically and exclusively concerned with Web technologies.

There are many use cases for which one could warp HTML -- e.g. it could be 
(and has been) used to author books, it could be (and has been) used to 
author letters, it could be (and has been) used to author help 
documentation. However, HTML5's scope does not include developing 
technologies to compete with DocBook, ODF, or the info format. If we end 
up developing a technology that happens to work for those cases that's 
fine, but it is not our goal, and such use cases are not going to be 
considered in the development of HTML5.

Thus, if those are amongst your use cases, I recommend taking such 
concerns to more appropriate mailing lists.

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