Actually, I think it's almost obvious that we *have* to work this way;
trying to achieve consensus before we try experiments is a sure road
to failure.
The thing we need to bear in mind is the lesson of Netscape, though.
Much of the brouhaha about Netscape comes from them doing exactly
this. Problem is, their experiments get so quickly adopted by everyone
that they become de facto standards almost instantly, and *have* to
get adopted into the official standards.
Hopefully, we can avoid this, simply by dint of competition. Netscape
*is* the 300 pound gorilla of HTML, with an overwhelming market share.
(Yes, there's Mosaic, but the stats I've seen indicate that it's
really a small segment of the market at the moment.) *If* we can get
some real competition in browsers going, then this factor will be
greatly reduced, because people will have incentive to stay compatible
with the other browsers. I'm encouraged by the fact that SGI/TGS and
Intervista will be releasing almost simultaneously; this will
hopefully help.
But regardless, we should keep our eyes open, and be very careful.
It's really easy for one browser's experiments to sidetrack the
standards process...
>I raise this question now because I'm going to suggest that some of the more
>popularly requested features, such as sound, be omitted from the 1.0 spec.
Oh, hell yes. Sound *might* be appropriate for 1.1; certainly for 2.0.
But let's not hold up 1.0 for something this *big*; let's get it out
there, and get people playing with it...
-- Justin
Who thinks that we need to spend a while
longer talking about sound before we're
even ready to *start* implementing it...
Random Quote du Jour:
"My *God*! He's eating that man's *head*!"
"It's *okay*, it's *okay*! I'm a *senator*!"
-- from LSH