They're requesting the ability for anyone to extend the standard without risking incompatibility with future versions—in exactly the same way that anyone can already extend XHTML 1.0 and XHTML5.
Sam was appointed co-chair (with Chris Wilson of Microsoft) of the HTML working group in January 2009, and I expect he'll be a prominent supporter of some version of this proposal. But the primary editor of HTML5 (Ian Hickson of Google; his co-editor is David Baron of Apple) has so far preferred more limited additions that address specific use cases, such as the "data-" attributes in current drafts, or hard-coded support for specific W3C vocabularies like SVG. His reasons are similar to yours; he hopes that by forcing all extensions to go through the HTML working group, the W3C might prevent implementors from fragmenting HTML into mutually incompatible dialects.
While I agree that in the common case entensibility will often be used for evil, it can also drive progress and innovation.
To play Devil's Advocate though, there are many examples that can be brought out in favor of extensibility.
For one, XMLHtttp was invented by Microsoft back in the IE4 (I believe, though maybe it was IE5) days. The amount of AJAX we use today was entirely possible back then, as long as you were willing to limit yourself to the Microsoft browser.
If you always limit yourself to the standard, you'll never end up moving forward. The IE5 spec timeline only projects a finished spec in 2020. Do you think that by 2020 we won't have leapt leaps and bounds ahead of what the HTML5 spec aimed to standardize?
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This seems like it could so easily be used for evil.
It literally seems like they're requesting their own custom, proprietary extensions on HTML builtin to the standard.
They're requesting the ability for anyone to extend the standard without risking incompatibility with future versions—in exactly the same way that anyone can already extend XHTML 1.0 and XHTML5.
It's not just Microsoft. Sam Ruby of IBM has been requesting it since 2007 when he made a very similar proposal: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/08/02/HTML5-and-Distribute...
Sam was appointed co-chair (with Chris Wilson of Microsoft) of the HTML working group in January 2009, and I expect he'll be a prominent supporter of some version of this proposal. But the primary editor of HTML5 (Ian Hickson of Google; his co-editor is David Baron of Apple) has so far preferred more limited additions that address specific use cases, such as the "data-" attributes in current drafts, or hard-coded support for specific W3C vocabularies like SVG. His reasons are similar to yours; he hopes that by forcing all extensions to go through the HTML working group, the W3C might prevent implementors from fragmenting HTML into mutually incompatible dialects.
While I agree that in the common case entensibility will often be used for evil, it can also drive progress and innovation.
To play Devil's Advocate though, there are many examples that can be brought out in favor of extensibility.
For one, XMLHtttp was invented by Microsoft back in the IE4 (I believe, though maybe it was IE5) days. The amount of AJAX we use today was entirely possible back then, as long as you were willing to limit yourself to the Microsoft browser.
If you always limit yourself to the standard, you'll never end up moving forward. The IE5 spec timeline only projects a finished spec in 2020. Do you think that by 2020 we won't have leapt leaps and bounds ahead of what the HTML5 spec aimed to standardize?