We’re now three weeks into the W3C HTML WG and 662 e-mail messages further. There are 231 participants and Microsoft might join soon. Meanwhile there has been a silly debate on whether mailing lists and IRC are not too old school. Apparently some people think we should adopt an online forum instead. I deleted most of that discussion. (If you agree, by the way, join the WHATWG forums.) There was also another thread about too many messages mostly fueled by those sending lots of weird e-mails in the first place. Also a long thread about an element for an XML input control. Sort of like Xopus except that all control would be in the hand of the browser or a plugin. Didn’t sound like a good idea to me.
The Working Group almost had a teleconference. I was looking forward to a chaotic one hour call, but it was cancelled due to both technical difficulties and lack of a proper agenda. Maciej with help from David, Marcos, Henri, Ian and I wrote down HTML Design Principles (Proposed). As you can tell document is being discussed now. (The document is basically lists the design principles the HTML5 proposal is based on.)
The Working Group also has an IRC channel now: #html-wg on irc.w3.org:80.
So far, so good, I'd say. Not much to talk about, really, but then there's nothing negative to talk about either. ;-) I'm looking forward to when Microsoft joins and we decide how our relationship with WHAT WG should be, when our roadmap is going to be set, etc. Exciting time.