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Microsoft Suggests Carving Up HTML 5
dp619 writes "HTML 5 is extensive and may take years to complete. Microsoft's solution to hasten its development is to carve it up. The company wants to divide HTML 5 into sub-specifications overseen by different working groups. Internet Explorer platform architect Chris Wilson said that HTML 5 features including its Canvas APIs, offline caching of Web applications' resources, persistent client-side data storage, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networking connection framework would be useful outside of HTML. The WC3 seems to be receptive to the idea and says that a consensus is forming among working group members to do just that."
I've said this before but I'm going to say it again.
Before anyone can work on a standard, their company must agree to donate any patents that become part of the standard to the standards org, and the standards org must allow any patents they own to be used for no charge. The original company can say "no" to the use of their patent in the standard. If any patented stuff 'accidently' gets placed into the standard, it is up to the company to notice and reject the use of their patented stuff. Failure to do so is an implicit agreement to the previous patent requirements.
If a third party places another company's patented stuff into a standard, the sole economic burden for any lawsuits, licenses, etc. shall fall on that third party, if there is no representation of the company on the standards committee.
I'm sure I haven't covered all issues that could arise, but you get the idea.
Actually the spec has an annotation system where you can see how stable each section is, so we've somewhat side-stepped the issue of the whole thing not being done being a blocker for smaller parts.
In practice, implementors (including Microsoft!) are happily implementing HTML5 already.
Making the one spec be a bazillion smaller specs wouldn't stop us from having to make sure that each bit is compatible with implementations of that bit. Also, a smaller spec doesn't necessarily go much faster through the system than a big spec. Just look at XMLHttpRequest, which used to be part of HTML5 -- it's been split off for years, but it's still far from being a REC, and that's for a spec that's actually just describing existing browsers! This isn't anyone's fault, it's just that specs take a long time to get right. Anne's doing a great job on that spec, and I'm really glad he took it out of HTML5.
Hopefully other editors will come up and volunteer to take other things out of HTML5. Several people have tried; we have a very poor success rate for these specs. Generally, things that get taken out just languish and die a slow death until I fold them back into HTML5.
Until I started working on HTML5, there was no spec that defined "window" (as in, window.location, window.document, etc), there was no spec that defined XMLHttpRequest, there was no spec that defined the details of how to talk between iframes, etc. Does this mean nobody cares about those either?