Adobe seems to think that those three things aren't related to HTML5. That may or may not formally be the case, but HTML5 without canvas is so much less.
So what's the real story here? My wild guess is that Microsoft is making noises about implementing more of HTML5. If Adobe gets Canvas shifted out of the spec that radically reduces the chances of it being implemented in IE.
edit: or, "As a First Public Working Draft, this publication will trigger patent policy review." Is Adobe trying to keep patents on Canvas under wraps?
No idea what the "real story" is here, or if there is one beyond what they've said. There's no patent review issue here, though, since the canvas stuff has already been published as FPWD by the W3C HTML working group in the HTML5 spec itself. Thus Adobe is already bound by the patent policy on this stuff.
This process has been going on for how many years, and now they want to declare Canvas out-of-scope? It seems like the time for such complaints is long past.
It appears that representatives from Google and Opera are the ones playing politics:
At least two members of this team, Ian Hickson[1] and Anne van Kesteren[2], representing Google and Opera, respectively, have been writing this morning that Adobe is officially blocking publication of HTML5. This type of communication could cause FUD among the community of users, and should be addressed as soon as possible.
How does it appear that they are playing politics, rather than (say) that Larry Masinter (representing Adobe) is playing politics by claiming that canvas etc. are out of scope for the WG?
Other participants in the email discussion linked by the parent have said that these things have already been determined to be in scope for the WG. Larry Masinter says otherwise. I have no inside information or expertise and do not propose to try to resolve that dispute :-), but the claims being made by (it seems) everyone other than Larry Masinter seem plausible prima facie.
If publicizing an Anonymous Hold™ by a corporation with a vested interest in neutering HTML5 is now called "politics", then I want to be a fucking politician.
It relates to the whole RDFa vs Microdata argument, which itself is being used as a proxy for the W3C vs WHAT-WG power struggle. RDFa is the W3C’s solution for embedding meta-data into HTML, whereas Microdata is Ian Hixon’s baby. The W3C working group recently voted to split Microdata out of the HTML5 spec, something that Hixon, as editor, was not pleased about. He did it for the W3C spec, but not for the WHAT-WG, thus meaning the two specs are no longer in sync.
Whoever is right, Ian Hixon’s opinion should be only be considered in light of his personal stake in this issue, and his often demonstrated disdain for the W3C and its processes in general. Portraying the W3C as a secretive, compromised organisation helps to drive people toward the WHAT-WG. Of course, the WHAT-WG, being a smaller, invitation-only group of browser vendors, is in many ways more opaque than the W3C, it just lacks some of the bureaucracy around it.
Anyone who's been following this stuff knows that my opinion on microdata is only barely above my opinion of RDFa, so saying that I'm biased on this is pretty silly. I'd be perfectly happy to see both features die, I think they're both pretty silly! Unfortunately, people have put forward a number of use cases that they want addressed, so we apparently need _some_ solution, and if we're going to have one I'd rather it not be the waaaay over-complicated RDFa.
Re the second bit: describing the WHATWG as "opaque" is pretty silly, given how radically open it is.
