Re: "Pave The Cowpaths" Design Principle

Laura Carlson wrote:
> The proposed HTML 5 design principle "Pave The Cowpaths" [4] does
> indeed seem to condone many practices that past specs  may have
> frowned upon. "Pave the Cowpaths" is an underlying principle being
> debated in many* of the recent semantics and accessibility threads on
> public-html@w3.org.

Is it possible that the two sides are talking past each other a little 
bit? I can see two possible formulations of "Pave the Cowpaths":

1) Find a thing lots of people are trying to do, and the markup 
hacks/proprietary features/workarounds they are using to do it, and put 
those hacks into the spec.

2) Find a thing lots of people are trying to do, and make sure the new 
spec provides a simple way to do it, which may or may not be related 
markup-wise to the way they are doing it now.


I think perhaps that many Pave The Cowpath proponents are arguing for 
2), but many of their opponents are afraid of and arguing against 1). 
Could that be so?

I would certainly argue for 2), but be against 1), as _principles_.

Gerv