Re: web standards project article

Le 28 oct. 2004, à 13:11, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux a écrit :
> Le jeu 28/10/2004 à 10:58, Ant Tears a écrit :
>>  So semantic markup is an implied goal, not even a measure of
>> compliance, and something we are trying still to understand. Semantic
>> markup is a best practice, not an explicit recommendation.
>
> Indeed, semantics are not measured in terms of conformance; the same 
> way
> that saying "Dogs fly" cannot be sanctioned as being a grammatically
> incorrect sentence, nor even an illogical sentence. It just doesn't
> match the reality as we (or at least I) know it.

That's only one part of the issue. As it seems silly and impossible to 
enforce the nature of the semantics of the content of an element, it 
might be worthwhile do demonstrate that an element is useful for the 
user implementation-wise.

People uses "something" because they have a reason to do so. Among 
them, it can be:
	- Ethics (weak)
	- Fun    (weak)
	- Practical personal benefits (strong)
	- Benefits for other persons  (strong)

Right now, we could say that in most of the cases, HTML/XHTML uses are 
driven by Web standards afficionados and then Fun and Ethics. But it's 
a weak case for XHTML.

For each element of XHTML and their intended, it would be very good to 
develop best practices, use cases and then it will help implementers to 
define best usage of the technology.

To come back on DOM's blockquote example, a good thing would be to have 
a search engine implementing blockquote, which will mean for example 
having a quotation search engine.
	Another possibility is to have blockquote implemented in Weblog 
Authoring tool. When I'm browsing a weblog and I want to quote an part 
of an article it could come with the "blockquote" element and the 
"cite" attribute

Having Best Practices... will implementers, and then real benefits of 
XHTML Uses.



-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***