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Results of Questionnaire Polyglot Note vs Recommendation Track Preference Survey
The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody. In addition, answers are sent to the following email addresses: pcotton@microsoft.com, rubys@intertwingly.net, mjs@apple.com, mike@w3.org
This questionnaire was open from 2013-12-03 to 2013-12-10.
42 answers have been received.
Jump to results for question:
1. Should Polyglot Markup continue on the Recommendation track?
HTML WG has not reached consensus on whether the Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents should continue to progress on the Recommendation Track or if the Working Group should end work by publishing a Working Group Note. This Preference Survey results from discussions on bug 12725. This bug has not been resolved and it is considered that further discussion in bugzilla will not result in the bug being resolved.
Clearly, we do not have unanimity on how to proceed. Rationales have been provided for both positions:
- Rationale statement in favor of keeping the Polyglot specification on the Recommendation track.
- Rationale statement in favor of ending work on the Polyglot Markup specification and publishing the result as a Working Group Note.
At this point, per the Decision Policy, we are proceeding using this survey to give Working Group participants a final opportunity to express their preference.
Since this is a process, not a technical decision, the survey is by individual not organization. Simple majority wins.
Please read the rationale statements carefully before responding.
A yes answer indicates you would like the Polyglot Markup specification to continue on the Recommendation Track.
A no answer indicates that you would like to see work on the Polyglot Markup specification ended at this time and for the results to be published as a Working Group Note.
Summary
| Choice | All responders |
|---|---|
| Results | |
| yes | 21 |
| no | 19 |
| concur | 1 |
| abstain | 1 |
Details
| Responder | Should Polyglot Markup continue on the Recommendation track? | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Sam Ruby | yes | |
| John Vernaleo | no | |
| Simon Myers | no | |
| Matthew Turvey | no | |
| David Carlisle | yes | |
| David Baron | no | |
| Jens Oliver Meiert | no | |
| Philip Jägenstedt | no | |
| Andrew Fedoniouk | no | |
| Henri Sivonen | no | http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0006.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0021.html See also the follow-ups: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0104.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0107.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0109.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0035.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0248.html Furthermore, I object to the characterization "This commonly arises in legacy systems and content syndication." in the second paragraph of Status of This Document. I also object to the section Introduction overselling polyglot markup by making questionable claims even if the overselling is sort-of acknowledged by the notes at the end of each subsection backpedaling somewhat. |
| Simon Pieters | no | Agree with Henri. |
| James Graham | no | |
| Larry Masinter | yes | The work is in scope. The work is useful primarily because it is normative. Deciding that something is worth publishing should not be a consensus or majority decision. The W3C should publish specifications which are technically sound, and have sufficient interest -- even a lot of people who think it isn't interesting, but otherwise have no substantial technical complaints shouldn't dissuade W3C from moving it to Recommendation. |
| Roy Fielding | yes | The arguments against continuation seem to be based on erroneous notions of what it means for a specification to be Recommendation-track. It is clearly in scope for the WG charter. If there are working group members that are interested in a well-formed-XML profile of HTML, then defining one does not in any way reduce the normative nature of some other HTML Recommendation (if any). |
| Manu Sporny | yes | While my vote is to keep it on the Rec track, I don't expect that the document will have a great deal of impact when it comes to document authors and publishers. It seems like authoring a Polyglot Markup compatible document would take a great deal of time to get right, you'd need excellent tooling in place, and a simple edit to a polyglot file could invalidate it as a polyglot file. I spent 20 minutes looking through the spec and decided that our company wouldn't attempt to publish Polyglot documents due to the implementation burden placed on our engineering teams. HTML5 works just fine for us. That said, I don't think we should prevent a Rec track document from proceeding if there is concensus around the technical points and there is some community out there that finds the document useful. |
| Chaals Nevile | yes | The change control argument seems to assume that the polyglot spec will not refer to stable documents - which would be a sound technical reason for opposing the publication of a particular draft of the document, but is a silly reason for opposing the very idea of a Recommendation. There are normative statements, and making a Recommendation conveys the appropriate message - there there is a way W3C considers the correct way to do polyglot. This allows people who are using XML tools for HTML (such as Yandex) to work toward interoperability rather than guessing on their own. |
| Travis Leithead | yes | |
| Jatinder Mann | yes | |
| Jacob Rossi | yes | |
| Daniel Glazman | yes | |
| Jay Munro | yes | |
| Leif Halvard Silli | yes | Comments to some of Henri’s rationale: (Edit 1: Reformatted for better Web display. Edit 2: Some typos fixed. Some single-words added/replaced. See [square brackets].) 1. I agree that the sentence ”This commonly arises …”, should be improved. It came as part of a suggestion from the TAG, see bug 22563. This is an argument to keep working on the spec = Recommendation track. 2. Regarding “overselling” in the Introduction section: A. First subsection, ”Scope” ends with a “underselling” warning NOTE which Henri asked to be placed there. B. Subsection "Robustness": Concrete claims about overselling will be considered. Generally, the intro attempts the opposite of oversell. C. The entire Intro is largely about scope, as this was a commonly requested from us. I’m open to shorten it. 3. Henri’s two first pointers to public-html: A. Henri’s pointer to Henri Sivonen Fri, 2 Nov 2012 11:44:38 +0100 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0006.html Comment 1: Polyglot Markup is not *only* ”conclusions drawn from normative statements” in HTML5 and XML. See the Intro. (Sic.) It is a *particular* subset, which largely is a common subset, but not purely. It was, de facto, always like that. But this has ben emphasized and spelled out since 2012. I’m sure we don't mind spell it out better. Comment 2: The understanding of what the "pure" subset is (which, again, polyglot isn’t) has increased, amongst many partakers in the project, including some of those that currently has voted no. (For instance, the rules for white-space handling [in attributes] in XML was long misunderstood. The clarification of that also contributed positively to HTML5 proper, including the definition of how to do @srcdoc in XHTML5.) (Let me dig up pointers, if you wish.) Comment 3: Since November 2012 message, Polyglot has become “looser”, as result of the editors listening to critics, including Henri. For instance, it now allows more markup inside <script> and <style> than before. Comment 4: As for XHTML5, then HTML5 - and this too is new since november 2012 - now allows <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8"/> even in XHTML5. This was forbidden before, because HTML5 forbade it - it was stricter than necessary. Comment 5: It was very much with my co-editor hat on, that I engaged in bug 23587, and [that] HTML5.1 has now chosen the same option that Polyglot now [recommends] is encouraging. <https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23587#c10> Comment 6: Risks that Polyglot becomes [too] strict. As shown above, work on Polygot has actually affected ”HTML5 proper”, both directly and indirectly. Because, even if it is supposed to be a subset, it is not so that it is only polyglot that gets impacted by HTML5. It is *not* just a one way thing. Thus, by halting work on polyglot, there is also a risk that work on HTML5 - and XHTML5 - proper suffers. B. Henri’s pointer to Lachlan Hunt Sun, 04 Nov 2012 15:59:50 +0100 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0021.html Comment 1: On the normativity and recommendation issue, I concur with Larry and Roy. But add that the main thing to me is whether work has ended or not[,] and that it has not ended. Comment 2: Lachlan’s inputs, has been very much on my mind in my edits. A clear place were his objection has not been met is w.r.t. encoding: the Polyglot Markup profile requires UTF-8. But his UTF-8 views has been met in the sense that it is clarified, in the, spec, that it is "just" a profile and for the issue of UTF-8, in particular it has been explained that it is *possible* to use other encodings without suffering w.r.t. DOM equivalence, see the introduction. Comment 3: Here is a list of issues where Lachlan’s comments have been met directly, IMO: A) <script> and <style> now basically permits any content, as long as it follows the //<![CDATA[ //]]> rules Lachlan described at the end of his follow-up: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Nov/0063.html B) Perhaps it can be improved, but we have made the principles section normative, as suggested by him and others. |
| Eliot Graff | yes | "Polyglot markup" normatively specifies markup to satisfy the need to create markup that results in nearly identical DOMs whether parsed by an html or xml parser. The specification should remain on its recommendation track. Thanks to _everyone_ for their considered feedback on this project to date. |
| Cynthia Shelly | yes | This is important for content-management scenarios. |
| Richard Schwerdtfeger | abstain | No opinion either way. |
| Youngsun Ryu | yes | |
| Steve Faulkner | concur | |
| John Simmons | yes | |
| Adrian Bateman | yes | |
| Doug Jones | no | |
| Arne Johannessen | yes | |
| Theresa O'Connor | no | The HTML spec already provides author conformance requirements for the HTML and XML syntaxes of the HTML language. As such, it provides a platform for any interested parties (such as national agencies, trade organizations, scientific and creative communities, and groups like the EPUB WG at the IDPF) to define their own profiles / subsets of the language which impose additional authoring constraints. |
| Gavin Carothers | yes | Introducing strict normative requirements for Polyglot Markup will reduce the amount of Polyglot Markup that exists. As most/all polyglot markup in the wild is extremely fragile I believe it will result in more implementations choosing to either produce XML or HTML and far fewer attempts to create Polyglot Markup. Those that do NEED to produce Polyglot Markup will benefit from the clear instructions, while the depth and detail is likely to scare off implementations that think it's easy. |
| Mathew Marquis | no | |
| Ian Hickson | no | The REC track makes no sense for any spec, let alone something like this which, if it even exists at all, should just be describing the corollaries of the requirements in other specs. |
| Erika Doyle Navara | yes | |
| Kris Krueger | yes | This seems to have value for content creators and would be good to continue. |
| Jer Noble | no | |
| Cameron McCormack | no | |
| Joseph Pecoraro | no | I agree with the rationale (and further discussion on related threads) ending work on the specification and publishing as a Note. |
| Tantek Çelik | no | http://tantek.com/2010/302/b1/xhtml-dead-long-live-xml-valid-html5 |
| Maciej Stachowiak | no |
More details on responses
- Sam Ruby: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 15:28 (UTC)
- John Vernaleo: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 16:24 (UTC)
- Simon Myers: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 17:07 (UTC)
- Matthew Turvey: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 18:56 (UTC)
- David Carlisle: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 19:14 (UTC)
- David Baron: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 19:41 (UTC)
- Jens Oliver Meiert: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 20:04 (UTC)
- Philip Jägenstedt: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 20:31 (UTC)
- Andrew Fedoniouk: last responded on 3, December 2013 at 21:29 (UTC)
- Henri Sivonen: last responded on 4, December 2013 at 07:37 (UTC)
- Simon Pieters: last responded on 4, December 2013 at 13:15 (UTC)
- James Graham: last responded on 4, December 2013 at 15:39 (UTC)
- Larry Masinter: last responded on 4, December 2013 at 22:35 (UTC)
- Roy Fielding: last responded on 4, December 2013 at 23:16 (UTC)
- Manu Sporny: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 02:19 (UTC)
- Chaals Nevile: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 08:54 (UTC)
- Travis Leithead: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 18:46 (UTC)
- Jatinder Mann: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 18:48 (UTC)
- Jacob Rossi: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 18:55 (UTC)
- Daniel Glazman: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 19:17 (UTC)
- Jay Munro: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 19:19 (UTC)
- Leif Halvard Silli: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 20:31 (UTC)
- Eliot Graff: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 20:59 (UTC)
- Cynthia Shelly: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 21:13 (UTC)
- Richard Schwerdtfeger: last responded on 5, December 2013 at 22:53 (UTC)
- Youngsun Ryu: last responded on 6, December 2013 at 01:12 (UTC)
- Steve Faulkner: last responded on 6, December 2013 at 10:32 (UTC)
- John Simmons: last responded on 6, December 2013 at 22:57 (UTC)
- Adrian Bateman: last responded on 6, December 2013 at 23:22 (UTC)
- Doug Jones: last responded on 9, December 2013 at 15:02 (UTC)
- Arne Johannessen: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 01:35 (UTC)
- Theresa O'Connor: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 20:23 (UTC)
- Gavin Carothers: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 20:43 (UTC)
- Mathew Marquis: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 20:50 (UTC)
- Ian Hickson: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 20:57 (UTC)
- Erika Doyle Navara: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 22:08 (UTC)
- Kris Krueger: last responded on 10, December 2013 at 22:39 (UTC)
- Jer Noble: last responded on 11, December 2013 at 00:08 (UTC)
- Cameron McCormack: last responded on 11, December 2013 at 02:09 (UTC)
- Joseph Pecoraro: last responded on 11, December 2013 at 02:47 (UTC)
- Tantek Çelik: last responded on 11, December 2013 at 02:50 (UTC)
- Maciej Stachowiak: last responded on 11, December 2013 at 04:49 (UTC)
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