[Bug 7034] authoring conformance requirements in the spec should either be removed or replaced

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7034





--- Comment #32 from Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>  2010-03-21 11:57:09 ---
Clear statement of the problem:

The overwhelming majority of the Author Conformance Requirements that are
contained in the spec cover situations that pose no real interoperability
problems.  Not only is this an incorrect application of RFC 2119, as a
strategy, it is entirely self-defeating.  Specs that contain such requirements
will be willfully, flagrantly, and widely violated.  Furthermore, such
requirements that have no basis in interop issues and describe situations that
either authors or tools will commonly violate cause validators to produce
volumes of spurious issues that only serve to obscure real problems.

Specifically problematic are the Author Conformance Requirements that
essentially treat the web as being versioned and/or define personal preferences
which are not universally shared.  It simply is not a viable strategy to
revisit the web every decade or so and declare documents that conform to
recommendations that were made as little as a decade ago as now non-conformant
without a clear and significant problem.  As an example: "CSS would be better"
is not such a problem.

Issue:

Author Conformance Requirements exist in the spec for which there is no
documented rationale and over which there is no consensus.

Sections affected:

Effectively the whole specification.

One suggested way to solve the problem:

Remove and and all author conformance requirements which cover markup that
poses no significant interop issues.

Additional analysis can be found here:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/HTML5_Authoring_Conformance_Study#Methodology


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Received on Sunday, 21 March 2010 11:57:11 UTC