[whatwg] One document or two?

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 24 Jun 2009, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > I don't think alternative style sheets are evil; in fact, they seem to be
> > quite within the architecture of the Web. Surely you don't think that,
> > e.g., GMail is evil for having the same URL for whether your contact list
> > is hidden or expanded.
> 
> I can't give other people links to my Gmail URLs anyway, since they
> don't know my password (I hope).  On the other hand, if I'm reading
> the author version of HTML 5 and want to quote a portion of it to
> someone with a link, it would be rather confusing if they said "Hey,
> that's not what it says!"

If you're worried that they set their cookie or changed their style sheet 
such that they're hiding the implementor text, then point them to

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/?style=complete

...when sending them the link.


> Publicly-viewable *documents* -- not necessarily applications which may 
> have no stable state anyway -- whose *contents* -- not UI -- differ as 
> dramatically as this should have different URLs.  That's how documents 
> on the web have always worked, and that's what people expect.

The content doesn't differ, it just has some text hidden on demand.

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