In article
<6361100b-0d05-4f86-b3d5-87f580073...@n20g2000vba.googlegroups.com>,

Publish in what way? HTML 5 as it exists on any given day is already
published in the sense that it is public and anyone can GET in and read
it freely.

The stability of a given part of the open Web platform doesn't really
depend on the declared publication status of any document. It depends on
whether major implementations have converged on uniform (aka.
interoperable) behavior on the part of the platform. Thus, pushing
*documents* more quickly doesn't help. Writing code does.

Having a spec is beneficial, since it lowers the cost of making the
convergence happen where it hasn't already by lowering the cost of
finding out on what to converge thereby making the writing code part
faster.

Surely browser implementors are well aware of this situation, so
"publishing" a document quickly doesn't achieve anything as far as
communicating with browser implementors goes that a public perma-draft
with stability annotations on a per-section basis doesn't achieve.

Non-rhetorical question: If one works on style system or layout code,
does it make more sense to read CSS 2.1 or to read the latest Editor's
Draft of the relevant CSS3 spec?

If the purpose of "publishing" is to send signals to people other than
browser implementors, to whom and why?

On a more meta-level, in the light of point #7 at
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2009/01/19/where-memes-go-to-die/ :
Do you have a vision on how browser vendors should behave wrt. speccing
and communication among competitors when introducing new features to the
open Web platform? (I have a vision about that. I'll try to find time to
write it down.)

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivo...@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/