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    dc:title="Documenting the Web vs. reinventing it"
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    dc:description="Ian Hickson, the editor of the current HTML5 draft, posted an Error handling in URIs message to the uri@w3.org mailing list outlining some issues related to browser error handling behaviour for URIs, and to IRIs and character encodings other than..."
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                        <h2 class="entry-header">Documenting the Web vs. reinventing it</h2>
                           <div class="entry-body">
                              <p>Ian Hickson, the editor of the current <a href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/" >HTML5 draft</a>, posted an <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2008Jun/thread.html#msg2" >Error handling in URIs</a> message to the uri@w3.org mailing list outlining some issues related to browser error handling behaviour for URIs, and to IRIs and character encodings other than UTF-8 — and asking, “Is there any chance that the URI and IRI specifications might get updated to handle these issues?”.</p>

<p>That posting and question spawned some <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/2008Jun/thread.html#msg2" >spirited discussion</a>, with messages from Julian Reschke, Anne van Kesteren, Tim Bray, John Cowan, Frank Ellermann, and Martin Duerst, and provoking some comments like the following one:</p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>That’s kind of what I said already, and why I guess that HTML5 will never fly:  It tries to reinvent the Web, if not the Internet.</p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>…and from Ian to the above, the following response:</p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>Actually we’re trying to not reinvent the Web, but to document it, so that browser vendors can write browsers that handle existing Web content in a fashion compatible with legacy UAs without reverse-engineering each other.</p>
    <p>(It’s true that this is requiring defining things that are at odds with existing specifications, but that’s mostly because those specifications aren’t in fact in line with real usage…)</p>
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                       <p class="postinfo">Filed by <a href="">Michael(tm) Smith</a> on June 26, 2008 12:23 AM in <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/archive/technology/html/">HTML</a><br />
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<h3 class="comments-header" id="comments">Comments</h3>
<div class="comment" id="comment-151254">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c151254">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Liam Morland </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c151254">#</a> 2008-06-27</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>It's not an either/or between documenting and reinventing. HTML5 does a little of both. The Non-SGML, NON-XML parsing algorithm is an example of documenting the web. The new elements like header and footer are reinventing: current browsers will not know what these are. Using dt and dd for dialog is documenting, but wrapping them in a dialog element is reinventing.</p>

<p>I think more could be done in HTML5 for backwards-compatibility. For example, if instead of a new header element, we used &lt;div role="header"&gt;, it would be understood as a div by current user agents and would additionally be understood as a header by new UAs.</p>

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<div class="comment" id="comment-153723">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c153723">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Ian Hickson </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c153723">#</a> 2008-07-09</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>Liam: I'd say it's "inventing" not "reinventing" -- reinventing implies replacement, as opposed to incremental addition.</p>

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