Re: ACTION-95, ISSUE-65: Plan to publish a new WD of HTML-5

At 13:06  +0000 28/01/09, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
>Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
>>But if there are multiple documents that separately normatively 
>>specify the same thing, then it is equally possible that they 
>>disagree and therefore at least one of the two is wrong. If one 
>>reference is normative and the other is not, then it is at least 
>>clear which is authoritative when they disagree.
>
>I agree.  Thus I would expect something similar to
>Mike's document to be normative for markup, and
>informative where it make reference to other aspects
>of "A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML".
>And I would expect other documents to be similarly
>divided : normative for the single topic that they
>specifically address, informative for topics that the
>author finds it necessary to cross-reference.
>

But if we go that route, we'd have an HTML5 spec. that was normative 
for semantics and processing, and informative for syntax and markup, 
and a markup spec. which was normative for the latter and (mostly 
un)informative about the former.  That seems really strange.  I mean, 
really really strange.

I have been trying to follow this discussion, and I have seen 
opposition to the idea that the markup spec. be normative, with the 
reason here, but I don't think I have seen support for the position 
that it and the html5 core specification (which is on a standards 
track) should both be normative.  Your idea is intriguing if odd, but 
before we explore it further, could someone remind me (us?) why they 
feel we should have another (probably overlapping) spec. on a track 
to normative status?
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 13:21:39 UTC