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.
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