Re: Trip Report: IETF meeting of HTML WG

Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Tue, 13 Dec 94 05:30:06 EST

> 0. It was decided that all "decisions" made by the group were to be
> subject to comment from the people on the html-wg mailing list.

This is standard IETF rules. We couldn't have decided otherwise.

> 1. The group discussed the file upload proposal from Larry Masinter.
> After deciding that the proposal was clearly not appropriate for HTML 2.0,
> discussion of the details was deferred to futures.

I don't think it was 'clearly not appropriate' but rather that it was
decided not to include it in HTML 2.0. And we did managed to discuss
it at length at the meeting, just not in the first part.

> 2. A lengthy discussion of international issues took place. The group
> decided that a small modification to a couple of paragraphs in the spec
> would be sufficient, leaving further investigation of the issue to futures.
> See #3.

How about "We discussed international character set issues." I
accepted an action item to circulate a draft of a revised paragraph.

> 3. A very lengthy discussion of end-of-line terminators broke out. The
> essential disagreement lies in the fact that current practice and the
> guidelines for text/* MIME types disagree. After long discussion of this
> and item #2 intertwined, Tim Berners-Lee summarized our decisions on a
> slide. I will await the actual minutes for the wording of those decisions,
> to avoid my mistyping them. I do recall that any changes to the document
> were very minor.

I'm not sure this entailed any changes to the document. And a recent
survey about the behavior of various HTML-interpreting-agents when
confronted with varying EOL conventions inside <PRE> convinced me that
we actually have a problem we need to solve here.

> 4. With very little moaning, the group reaffirmed the decision to include
> the previously agreed upon ICADD modifications to the document.

You could be more precise. "The group reaffirmed... While it was noted
that this wasn't exactly in keeping with the original 'current
practice' charter, everyone felt like this was a simple addition that
could be added nearly transparently" or some such.

> 5. It was suggested by more than one person that the IESG may not accept
> the document if it includes the DTD reference, as this could be considered
> 18 pages of essentially redundant (albeit useful) material.

No, it was suggested that the longer it was, the longer it would take
to process.

> Someone pointed out that the pipeline toward RFC-ness currently has a
> shorter-documents-come-first bias.

Actually, this was only jokingly proposed by the RFC editor.

> I pointed out that at some point, the accuracy of that section has
> been brought into question, but I wasn't 100% certain of its current
> status. The group decided that if the DTD reference is indeed
> algorithmically generated, and is complete and accurate, we should
> include it, as an appendix. Otherwise, it should be removed.