[whatwg] Spec formats

[Klaus Förster]

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Perry Smith <pedzsan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm somewhat frustrated right now.  I hope this email is not too caustic.
>>
>> The page at http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ causes my
>> Firefox to freeze for a minute or more.  Eventually it recovers and it has
>> all the pretty do-dads and things but it sure is painful to wait.  And, this
>> may be a Firefox problem but every time I hit a link, it freezes again as it
>> recomputes (I guess) all the pretty do-dads and things.  The pretty do-dads
>> and things just are not worth it to me.  Maybe there is something I can turn
>> off but not until after the first wait period.
>>
>> Second, I downloaded the PDF (the html-letter.pdf) and various tools (like
>> Acrobat reader) complain when I try to reflow the document.
>>
>> Third, if I save the page above to my disk and open it with dreamweaver and
>> try to make it in to an xhtml document, it dies.  The reason I'm trying to
>> do that is some html to pdf converters insist upon xhtml format.
>>
>> My ultimate goal (which I have now determined is hopeless) is to put these
>> documents on my "nook" so I can read them.  Putting the html-letter pdf on
>> my nook "works" but has many UI issues.  I thought if I could redo the
>> formatting somehow it might be nicer.  Which leads to my final question or
>> request.
>>
>> Can the original source of this, whatever it is stored in, be posted as
>> well?  There is a comment somewhere that says the W3 version and the whatwg
>> version comes from the same source.  It might allow energetic folks to offer
>> other formats of the books such as in epub format or some other eReader
>> style format.
> 
> The HTML5 spec serves, in addition to its role as a spec document, the
> additional role of a UA stress test.  It is a massive document with
> several scripts running over it on load.  Some browsers and systems
> can handle it.  None of the browsers on my computer can do it well
> (I'm using a laptop from 2003, though, so my hardware is definitely
> out-of-date).
> 
> To accommodate people like you and me, we have a multi-page version of
> the spec, where each page is much smaller and more easily handleable.
> You can reach it at whatwg.org/html5.
> 
> Another thing that might help you is to turn off the the scripts
> running on the full spec.  You can do that with some undocumented
> query parameter, but I forget what it is.  This will turn off some
> things like the commenting system and the implementation statuses, but
> it will usually allow a modern browser to handle the full spec
> document.
if (location.search == '?slow-browser')
        return;

And even better, quoting the release notes of Mozilla Developer Preview 
(1.9.3 alpha) [1]: "Loading the HTML5 specification no longer causes 
very long browser pauses. See bug 526394 [2] for details."

[1] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/devpreview/releasenotes/
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=526394
> 
> ~TJ
> 
klaus