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Message from discussion Moving past last call for HTML5
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Ian Hickson  
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 More options Feb 19 2009, 5:46 pm
Newsgroups: mozilla.dev.platform
From: Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:46:32 +0000 (UTC)
Local: Thurs, Feb 19 2009 5:46 pm
Subject: Re: Moving past last call for HTML5
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On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, sayrer wrote:
> On Feb 19, 4:51 pm, Ian Hickson <i...@hixie.ch> wrote:

> > An alternative approach, the one which the WHATWG (and by extension
> > the editor's draft in the HTMLWG) has been using, is to use the "vote
> > with your feet" approach: things that aren't implemented or used get
> > thrown out, things that _are_ implemented or used get adopted. For new
> > features this means that browser vendors have, as a group, the ability
> > to veto anything, but that's true anyway, whether we admit it or not.

> This is not quite right. Browser vendors with sufficient market share
> have an ability to effectively veto new features by themselves,
> especially if those features can't be emulated with existing
> technologies. HTML5's model of adding features that anyone implements
> (SQL, registerContentHandler, etc) overstates the ability of that vendor
> to add something to the Web. This demonstrably applies to all WHATWG
> participants, but not all W3C WG participants.

I agree that the situation is actually more subtle than my simplistic
description, but it's not quite as simple as you suggest either. For
example, <canvas> is part of the Web now, used in production code. (Yahoo!
Pipes and Dreamhost's user-facing tools are two examples of actual running
code that uses <canvas>, for instance.) Similarly for SVG. This is despite
the absence of support for these technologies in the market leader (by
installed base).

Note also that features aren't just added because someone implements it,
and features are certainly not kept just because one UA supports it. The
SQL stuff was added over my objections due to avid requests from two
vendors (Apple and Google) and the lack of any other proposals to address
the same use cases (how else do you store mail in an offline mail app? The
localStorage feature certainly doesn't cut it). Similarly, the register-
ContentHandler() feature was added because there was a clear use case and
no good alternatives.

(Not everything in HTML5 starts with implementations; <datagrid> and
<commmand> are two examples of things that had no planned or real
implementation when specced. Same applies outside HTML5, e.g. to XBL2.)

--
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


 
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