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                        <h2 class="entry-header">Reinventing HTML: Update</h2>
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  <p>In <a href=
  "http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/10/reinventing_html_discuss.html#c009040">a
  comment</a> on <cite><a href=
  "http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/10/reinventing_html_discuss.html">Reinventing
  HTML: discuss</a></cite>, OffBeatMammal wrote:</p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>I think it's very brave to try and reinvent something that's
    got such a widespread adoption and so many flawed
    interpretations. ...</p>
    <p>I, for one, would love to be able to contribute to this
    process...</p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>You can contribute. In fact, you just did. We have
  44 valuable comments on that item alone. Comments on weblogs are
  an important part of the process, along with spec reviews,
  criticism, advocacy, tutorial articles, books, conference
  presentations, and helping your buddy down the hall find the part
  of the latest CSS draft that's relevant to the problem he's
  working on.</p>
  <p>
  On the other hand, when you just write a weblog comment, it's hard
  to be certain who reads it and what their response is.  There's
  nothing like face-to-face contact. One of the key benefits of paid
  W3C membership is an invitation to meet all the other W3C members
  and the staff at <a href=
  "http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/organization.html">Advisory
  Committee meetings</a> twice a year. I have been to almost every one
  since 1995, but I missed the recent <a href="http://www.w3.org/News/2006#item231">AC meeting in Japan</a> due to conflicting
  travel obligations. What a meeting to miss:</p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>
    I wrote that this meeting was probably one of the most
    important ac meetings in the last eight years. I was right in
    that assumption.</p>
    <p>
    The discussion level, including on controversial topics, was a
    real pleasure and I am immensely happy the consortium is able
    to do this work on itself.</p>
    <address>
    <cite><a href=
    "http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2006/12/01/2299-open-letter-to-w3c-staff-and-members">
    Open letter to W3C staff and Members</a></cite> Daniel Glazman, 1
    Dec 2006</address>
  </blockquote>

  <p>
  Daniel's contributions to W3C and the Web include
  participating in HTML and CSS working groups and developing
  an open source HTML authoring tool. The <a href=
  "http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?Standards">Standards
  category</a> in his blog includes <cite><a href=
  "http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2006/10/29/2197-tim-berners-lee-thank-you">
  Tim Berners-Lee, thank you</a></cite>, a 29 October response to
  <cite>Reinventing HTML</cite>, where he writes:</p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>
    And <a href="http://disruptive-innovations.com/">Disruptive
    Innovations</a> is probably going to join that Working Group to
    make the 21st century's web happen.
    </p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>
  Those of you who commented on the disconnect between
  W3C and browser vendors and the WHAT WG, take note that Daniel
  praises the W3C's renewed connections with browser vendors. While
  he welcomes the contribution of Chris Wilson of Microsoft, Daniel
  also expresses concern at having the chair affiliated with any
  major browser vendor.
  </p>

  <p>Formal comments on the charter from W3C members are due January
  7, and a decision on whether to start the new working group should
  follow a few weeks later, following section <a
  href="http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/acreview.html#ACReviewAfter">8.1
  Advisory Committee Reviews</a> of the <a
  href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/">W3C Process</a>.</p>

  <p>
  We consider informal comments too, on a best-effort basis.
  Ian Hickson has some interesting <a href=
  "http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2006Nov/0053.html">
  input on how the HTML Working Group should be
  chartered</a>:
  </p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>
    Regarding technical matters, there shouldn't be a difference
    between being a working group member as a W3C Member Company, a
    W3C Invited Expert, or participating as a non-W3C Member.
    </p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>
  I support that goal, but I also support the goal of
  royalty-free Web specifications, and I'm not sure how to
  reconcile Hixie's suggestion with the W3C patent policy. He
  concludes:
  </p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>
    This latest charter makes big strides towards being the basis
    of an important cornerstone of the Web in the coming years. I
    hope you will be able to take the above feedback to heart. I
    look forward to taking part in this new working group.
    </p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>
  This is real progress since the <a href=
  "http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/2006Aug/0051.html">18
  August www-svg comments from Maciej Stachowiak of Apple</a>:</p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>
    I don't think it makes sense for vendors of browser-hosted
    implementations to continue to participate. Instead we
    should work out amongst ourselves what makes sense to implement
    in a web browser.
    </p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>In addition to the progress at an organizational
  level, there is lots of interesting technical work going on. The
  W3C Technical Architecture group acknowledged the broad impact of
  reinventing HTML on W3C's work as issue <a href=
  "http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues.html">TagSoupIntegration-54</a>:
  </p>

  <blockquote>
    <p>
    Is the indefinite persistence of 'tag soup' HTML consistent
    with a sound architecture for the Web? If so, what changes, if
    any, to fundamental Web technologies are necessary to integrate
    'tag soup' with SGML-valid HTML and well-formed XML?
    </p>
  </blockquote>

  <p>We had a <a href=
  "http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2006/12/12-tagmem-minutes">great
  discussion of the issue</a> (mostly face-to-face but with T. V.
  Raman participating remotely by phone and IRC) of how the problem
  is not just missing quotes and mixed up nesting; the
  <tt>script</tt> tag is an example of <cite><a href=
  "http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower">The Rule of Least
  Power</a></cite>, <q>Powerful languages inhibit information reuse</q>.
  XHTML is somewhat underspecified in the area of
  <tt>&lt;script&gt;</tt>, and it's as much art as science to
  figure out which idioms are sufficiently widely deployed in
  things like google ads that we should standardize them and which
  ones we can deprecate in the interest of simplicity and
  interoperability. Survey work like David Hammond's <a href=
  "http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support.php">Web Browser
  Standards Support</a> is really great to have in cases like
  this.</p>

  <div>
  tags: <a rel="tag"
  href="http://del.icio.us/connolly/xhtml">XHTML</a>, <a rel="tag"
  href="http://del.icio.us/connolly/quality">quality</a>, <a rel="tag"
  href="http://del.icio.us/connolly/web">web</a> <a rel="tag" href=
  "http://del.icio.us/connolly/architecture">architecture</a>
  </div>

                           </div>
                       <p class="postinfo">Filed by <a href="http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/">Dan Connolly</a> on December 22, 2006  7:19 PM in <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/archive/technology/html/">HTML</a><br />
<span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/12/reinventing_html_update.html">Permalink</a>
                                 | <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/12/reinventing_html_update.html#comments">Comments (5)</a>

</p>


<h3 class="comments-header" id="comments">Comments</h3>
<div class="comment" id="comment-14283">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c014283">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Henri Sivonen </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c014283">#</a> 2006-12-26</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>âI support that goal, but I also support the goal of royalty-free Web specifications, and I'm not sure how to reconcile Hixie's suggestion with the W3C patent policy.â?</p>

<p>I agree with what Hixie said about chartering and about participation of the WHATWG community members who arenât Members of the W3C. </p>

<p>I see the patent policy issue raised by W3C staff and also by at least one Microsoft representative. However, I donât see why applying the W3C patent policy precludes working like the WHATWG works. While I agree that the patent issue is important, I think the patent policy is a red herring as far as working methods and the cost of participation goes. Thereâs a big difference with requiring participants not to be evil with patents and requiring participants not to be evil with patents <em>and</em> additionally requiring W3C membership fees and F2F participation in various locations.</p>

<p>WHATWG participants who cannot afford to become W3C Members and who cannot afford to jet around to globe or even participate in trans-Atlantic telecons most likely donât have any patents nor pending applications and, therefore, could easily declare that they donât have any patents to disclose.</p>

<p>I have been able to participate in the WHATWG process in a useful way without having to pay thousands of euros up front to play. I cannot afford to be a Member of the W3C, so I am not one. I would, however, be willing to declare that I donât have patents and I wonât enforce patents against HTML5 implementors (except in retaliatory counter-enforcement if an HTML5 implementor first attempts to enforce a patent against me) if I acquire patents in the future if that was what it took to get the new HTML WG to work like the WHATWG has been working.</p>

</div>
</div>


<div class="comment" id="comment-14684">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c014684">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>Jilles van Gurp </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c014684">#</a> 2006-12-31</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>Interesting comments. I think the key thing that went wrong with html is that specifications were pushed out ahead of implementations and also that the people doing the specifications were not communicating very well with the people doing the implementation. This resulted implementors making important design decisions by themselves and the specification writers mostly ignoring those.</p>

<p>Repeating this mistake will lead to the same result. Standards should be developed together with a reference implementation (a credible one) and even some alternative implementations. Issues discovered during implementation should be solved and addressed at the specification level. Most JSR specs are developed this way and also many of the current web 2.0 specs are being developed this way. No spec should be final before it has a field tested 1.0 implementation.</p>

</div>
</div>


<div class="comment" id="comment-16271">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c016271">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ <a class="commenter-profile" href="http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/"><img alt="Author Profile Page" src="http://www.w3.org/QA/sununga/mt-static/images/comment/openid_logo.png" width="16" height="16" /></a></strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c016271">#</a> 2007-01-11</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>Henri, indeed, the patent policy is largely orthogonal to working methods, but they do interact in some ways. I was thinking about how to respond, but I see that Chris Wilson has done it for me in
<a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2007/01/10/you-me-and-the-w3c-aka-reinventing-html.aspx" rel="nofollow">You, me and the W3C (aka Reinventing HTML)</a>.</p>

</div>
</div>


<div class="comment" id="comment-18474">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c018474">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>chinayork </strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c018474">#</a> 2007-01-30</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>I'v writted webpages since last year,but only find <a href="http://validator.w3.org,thk" rel="nofollow">http://validator.w3.org,thk</a> you</p>

</div>
</div>


<div class="comment" id="comment-21351">
<p class="comment-meta" id="c021351">
<span class="comment-meta-author"><strong>http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/ <a class="commenter-profile" href="http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/"><img alt="Author Profile Page" src="http://www.w3.org/QA/sununga/mt-static/images/comment/openid_logo.png" width="16" height="16" /></a></strong></span>
<span class="comment-meta-date"><a href="#c021351">#</a> 2007-02-16</span>
</p>
<div class="comment-bulk">
<p>Note some thoughtful comments from arunranga of AOL, <a href="http://dev.aol.com/node/230" rel="nofollow">(Re)birthing Pangs: The HTML Charter Revisited</a>, as well as <a href="http://webkit.org/blog/?p=89" rel="nofollow">HTML Standards Process Returning from the Grave</a>, a conversation with the Apple WebKit developers.</p>

</div>
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