[whatwg] Removing versioning from HTML

[Aaron Boodman]

[If this has been discussed before, feel free to just point me there]

I frequently see the comment on this list and in other forums that
something is "too late" for HTML5, and therefore discussion should be
deferred.

I would like to propose that we get rid of the concepts of "versions"
altogether from HTML. In reality, nobody supports all of HTML5. Each
vendor supports a slightly different subset of the spec, along with
some features that are outside the spec.

This seems OK to me. Instead of insisting that a particular version of
HTML is a monolithic unit that must be implemented in its entirety, we
could have each feature (or logical group of features) spun off into
its own small spec. We're already doing this a bit with things like
Web Workers, but I don't see why we don't just do it for everything.

Just as they do now, vendors would decide at the end of the day which
features they would implement and which they would not. But we should
never have to say that "the spec is too big". If somebody is
interested in exploring an idea, they should be able to just start
doing that.

- a