Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
I have no will to wait and see whether or not the WHATWG recommendation
will eventually be applied. If we have to wait for one or two years to
get their final document then I don't see how an informational spec
could harm the community while waiting.
Don't freak out, but it's going to take *a lot* longer than 1 or 2 years
for the WHATWG work to finish. Hixie posted the estimated schedule on
www-archive.
First Working Draft . . . . 2007
Last Call Working Draft . . 2009
Candidate Recommendation . 2012
Proposed Recommendation . . 2022
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2006Nov/0000
However, that schedule really only represents the estimated time for a
sufficent amount of test cases to be written and for implementations to
become fully interoperable. As features get implemented by browsers,
you can start using them. e.g. things like <canvas> or XMLHttpRequest
are already widely supported and used, but their specs are not yet finished.
It's exactly the same with autodiscovery. Since much of it is already
widely supported and the rest of that section is relatively trivial to
implement, the official status of the spec won't hold it up at all.
But what you can do to speed up the process is to write test cases.
Hundreds of them for both HTML and XHTML, especially ones that test for
edge cases and non-conforming behaviour. That also helps to reveal
holes in the spec, since if you can't test something, it's not specced
well enough.
+1 to the pace.
Why on earth is it called a pace?
--
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/
