I recognized that final quote as being Sir Humphrey Appleby’s advice on ignoring pleading from early 80s UK political comedy Yes Minister, and indeed clicking your “1986” link has Hixie attributing it to a 1981 episode. So ... why 1986?
(PS: i tags used for the name of a pubished work because <cite> isn’t among the allowed list in comments.)
My read is that Hixie attributes it as follows:
Ref: “Yes, Prime Minister”, /A Victory For Democracy/. BBC, 1986
I thought the conclusion was pretty succinct. But for people who prefer PowerPoint over prose, here are some very concrete thoughts:
Let me know which parts of that are unclear.
Curiously, you don’t mention The Workshop, which had notable position papers: Mozilla/Opera, Microsoft.
Also, about Microsoft’s (non-)participation in the WHATWG: See the paragraph starting with "As an aside, I was asked personally to join the WHAT WG over a year ago." on Chris Wilson’s blog about invitation and patent policy.
Nothing curious about it... I was entirely unaware of The Workshop. Thanks for the pointer!
One of the wonders of blogging is that if you say what you do know, helpful people will come along and fill in the missing pieces. Another great source for missing pieces can be found in the HTML’s timeline on the ESW wiki.
There is yet another workshop, Shaping the Future of HTML which is very often forgotten. It happened in May 1998.
The first sentence of the workshop page is
Is HTML 4.0 the last HTML? Does XML mean the end of HTML? Has W3C given up on HTML?
The minutes (W3C Member only. I can’t read them anymore) of the workshop and the position papers have to be read because they contained gems of uncanny discussions with the current state of affairs.
Nothing curious about it... I was entirely unaware of The Workshop.
I’m surprised.
Anyway, the WHATWG didn’t simply form a group outside the W3C like your timeline suggests. The idea of continuing to evolve HTML and the DOM was presented and voted on in The Workshop. It was voted against twice (with the opposition growing on the second round of voting).
The WHATWG was ready to start before The Workshop, though. (The WHATWG mailing list archives start in April 2004.) When the W3C Members voted against doing the work at the W3C, the plan B, i.e. the WHATWG, was announced just two days later. To use feed terminology, it was a case of routing around Stop Energy.
I think the big problem with that vote and the other workshop Karl mentioned is the whole notion that the W3C could vote or otherwise decide to end-of-life a core language that the browsable Web depends on as if it were something for a committee to decide instead of something that depends on a market that isn’t completely under a committee’s control (a market where those who supply solutions for the core language presumably want to continue to do so and where there are also other competing offerings such as proprietary runtimes).
Recharter XHTML2 to either merge with HTML or eliminate overlap
Would rechartering the XHTML2 WG to work exclusively on XHTML2 in the http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2
namespace (in application/xml
) count as eliminating overlap? Or do you mean eliminating presumed use case overlap as well?
Evaluate consensus prior to Last Call
Do you already have an evaluation method in mind?
Or do you mean eliminating presumed use case overlap as well?
No. Analogy: at the ASF, we have both httpd and Tomcat.
Do you already have an evaluation method in mind?
I’ve given it some thought. Actually, the entire thread is instructive.