Tim Williams wrote:
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 10:07 PM, David Crossley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ross Gardler wrote:
Carlos Tejo Alonso wrote:
For a very long time we have intending to move to a subset of XHTML
2. But planning and doing are two different things. We need someone
with a suitably strong need to solve the problems posed by XDoc to
actually do it.
Maybe, we should start to think to do it. Could somebody show the
steps to move from xdoc to xhtml? I will try to do my bit.
If it were that simple we would have done it by now ;-)
There have been a number of false starts on this. My own effort was
aborted because a significant number of people in the community
disagreed with my approach.
Wow. That is not my recollection. I thought that we had a
little try, confirmed that it would take a co-ordinated
approach, and left it for another day. I am talking about
the re-working of all sitemaps and stylesheets (including
plugins) to deal with XHTML2 internally, leaving everything
else (e.g. cocoon) as it already is.
Are you talking about something else, or do you recall
it differently?
<blush> I reckon he's mostly referring to me:(
Gav made a start on an XHTML2 plugin (in whiteboard) but that also stalled.
IIRC, the initial "internal.xhtml2" and "input.xdoc" were
the result of Ross, Tim, and others around some of our
Friday IRC sessions. I thought that was a fantastic step forward.
I thought that it was just waiting for some group of people
to get itchy again.
The details are forgotten with time, but I believe the sticking point
was an issue of "scope" of what it means to transition. There were
two pieces of work to be done:
o) Data format - schema, updating input plugins, create xdoc->xhtml2
plugin, etc.
o) Pipeline refining - update pipelines to take advantage of xhtml2 + views
IIRC, I wanted them to be addressed separately to allow baby steps.
Ross preferred more holistic approach. Part of my motivation at the
time was that views were still very much a moving target. In the end,
no substantive steps were taken and I probably gave way too much merit
to how much any given approach really matters in the grand scheme.
Perhaps the only good news is that in the meantime the dispatcher has
matured, making the timing ripe for someone to re-engage.
As you say time blurs the recollection - but all the discussions are in
the mailing lists and the IRC session logs, in particular:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/forrest/events/forrest-friday/20050906-log.txt
and
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/forrest/events/forrest-friday/20050918-log.txt
I think Tim's recollection is close enough. At the time some people felt
that views were not mature enough for this early XHTML2 experimental work.
Today views (now Dispatcher) is reasonably stable, but it still has not
graduated from the whiteboard.
At the time of doing our experiments with the XHTML2 work I used views
*because* it was a moving target. At that time it was an opportunity to
rewrite significant portions of Forrest a piece at a time.
Once that was done we could decide to retrofit that to skins or to move
the work into the main dispatcher (nee views) pkugin. However, we never
got that far because we couldn't agree on the right approach and I
didn't want to waste my time on an approach that was not going to be
accepted by the community.
In that respect I think Davids recollections are also true. There is a
great deal of work to do to make XHTML2 happen and without the full
support of the community it isn't going to happen.
We are agreed that we need to do it. We are not agreed with how to do
it. Personally I think anyone who has the time to devote to this should
be free to just get on with it and we, as a community, should provide
whatever support we can.
It is the end result that matters not the road we take.
So, if someone is working in dispatcher on their home sites and their
itch says they need XHTML2 support then go for it with the dispatcher.
If you are using skins, then go for it using skins.
Ross
If my memory has served me wrong, I apologize in advance, it's
definitely not my intent to be a revisionist historian:)
--tim
