[whatwg] A New Way Forward for HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 24 Jul 2009, Joseph Pecoraro wrote:
> >
> > I think we need an approach that doesn't involve in-flow links... I'm 
> > just not sure what the right solution is. Maybe alt-double-clicking 
> > should show a menu with two options, "submit comment here" or "change 
> > section status"?
> 
> Alt-Double Click doesn't sound very discoverable.  Even if I knew that 
> shortcut I'd probably forget at some point.  Maybe having something 
> position:fixed would be better because there is something visible and 
> reachable at all times.  The problem then would be automatically 
> determining which section is being commented on.  Its certainly not as 
> straight-forward as clicking on the section.  Just some ideas.  I'm very 
> interested in seeing a commenting system.

Hmm... Maybe a position:fixed text field somewhere on the page, with a 
submit button to send that feedback as mail... that could work. It could 
give the ID of the most recently clicked area of the page, or something.


On Fri, 24 Jul 2009, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
> > 
> > That's an interesting approach, but I don't think it would work well 
> > with the HTML5 spec -- we probably need a mechanism that feeds into 
> > the current system (i.e. sends an e-mail) rather than annotating the 
> > document itself, and the document is in too much flux to track where 
> > the annotations go
> 
> That sounds to me like a good reason to declare a freeze at last call, 
> and release an immutable "beta 1" on which comments can be made.  Then 
> close the comment period on beta 1, and (potentially) release a beta 2, 
> etc.

Unfortunately that would just mean that most people commenting on beta 1 
would be reporting the same issues that have already been fixed. We've 
already seen this happen with the W3C version of the draft -- each time we 
release a /TR/ page snapshot, people report the same issues with that 
version for months, despite them having been fixed sometimes before the 
W3C version has even made it through the publication pipeline.

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