Modularity - Design Issues (original) (raw)

Tim Berners-Lee
Date: 2008-01-18, last change: Date:2010/02/2800:12:12Date: 2010/02/28 00:12:12 Date:2010/02/2800:12:12
Status: personal view only. Editing status: Published by Tim Berners-Lee on January 18, 2008 in the W3C blog. Copied to DesignIssues and edited in response to a comment from Noah Mendlesohn in Feb 2010.

Up to Design Issues

Simple things make firm foundations

You can look at the development of web technology in many ways, but one way is as a major software project. In software projects, the independence of specs, has always been really important, I have felt. A classic example is the independence of the HTTP and HTML specifications: you can introduce many forms of new markup language to the web through the MIME Content-Type system, without changing HTTP at all.

The modularity of HTML itself has been discussed recently, for example by Ian Hickson, co-Editor of HTML5:

Note that it really isn't that easy. For example, the HTML parsing rules are deeply integrated with the handling of