[whatwg] Attitude and Direction of the WHATWG

[Charles Pritchard]

On 3/1/2011 2:41 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Charles Pritchard wrote, in part (as, in the
> interests of making progress, I have not cited or responded to sections of
> the e-mail that did not include actionable feedback):
>> On 11/27/2010 2:50 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> On Fri, 26 Nov 2010, Charles Pritchard wrote:
>>>> I want to suggestion a reason for this impasse: the WHATWG intends
>>>> to produce a scene-graph specification. Other activities are out of
>>>> scope.
>>> I'm not sure what you really mean by "scene-graph specification", so
>>> it's hard to comment on that specifically. Historically, and still
>>> today, the HTML language and its associated APIs are generally
>>> intended to primarily convey semantics (meaning, as opposed to
>>> presentation) so that they can be rendered in a media-independent way
>>> on any device.
>> The HTML language has become even more semantic, less presentational, as
>> CSS+SVG profiles are enhanced.
>>
>> These three sections of the HTML5 specs seem out of scope: "Loading
>> Webpages", "Web application APIs" and "Communication"
> I must admit surprise to the idea that loading webpages is not in scope of
> the spec that defines the format used for web pages. :-)
>
> The HTML spec is primarily an API spec, describing how a DOM tree can be
> manipulated from script and how it must react to user interaction. So the
> APIs seem entirely in scope.
>
My understanding is that those items are covered by DOM, and WebIDL, 
which HTML inherits from.
There's a bulk of APIs under the "webapps" group, covering much of the rest.

I think that HTML spec is primarily a format spec, not an API spec.

>> Unfortunately, contenteditable is less accessible to users than it
>> should be. I'd like to see that addressed.
> Could you elaborate on how it is less accessible than it should be?
I can't. But I can give some examples of shortcomings, as the Google 
word processor
and Microsoft's editor are both quite short of coming anything near 
desktop word processing.

The CK editor is certainly still a great example of pushing it as far as 
they can.

My understanding is that rich text editing is really handed off to the 
UA (reading that from the ARIA
spec under the Rich Text editor control), and that it's usability is a 
UA issue, not a scripting/format issue.