[whatwg] A New Way Forward for HTML5

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Justin Lebar wrote:
> >>
> >> That being said, inline spec comments sound interesting.
> 
> > I'm not quite sure what the UI would look like, but if anyone has any 
> > ideas, feel free to e-mail me directly and we can figure something 
> > out. (This would be exceedingly useful once we're in last call in a 
> > few months.)
> 
> Other people have probably pointed this out, but the hg book has inline 
> comments.  http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/preface.html

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 -- 
even the current annotation system (the boxes on the left) have been 
problematic in this regard, and they're generally only anchored to 
sections, which are more stable than paragraphs. Also, I fear what it 
would do to the spec to add a link to every paragraph! :-)

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"?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'