Re: Proposal for developing HTML 5 materials for Web *authors*

[My points are mostly reiterations of points raised in the F2F.]

On Nov 21, 2007, at 08:21, Karl Dubost wrote:

> Web designers, webmasters, Web developers, teachers collectively may  
> decide that a stricter subset of HTML 5 is useful in their practices  
> of the Web.

Naturally, they are free to decide on a subset if they find it useful  
for their practice. It is, however, questionable whether such subset  
should be published by the W3C at all and in particular in a document  
that is marketed as a document explaining HTML5 to authors. A document  
marketed as explaining HTML5 to authors should explain the language  
defined in HTML 5.

> * Shall the syntax style be stricter than the one recommended by  
> HTML 5 specification.
>  example:
>  <p class=intro>Readable Markup
>  <p class="intro">Readable Markup</p>

I think a document published by the W3C for authors shouldn't subset  
what the spec proper defines as the conforming language, but it can  
opt to use a single convention for its examples.

> * Banning the use of some elements and/or proposing better techniques.
>  <font size=+2>

A document explaining the language to authors has no business banning  
elements that the spec proper allows. (The example given is already  
banned by the spec proper.)

>    [NAME] element
>
>    A short description of what is the element and the
>    requirements defined in the specification.

The template should probably have a consistent way for documenting the  
following:
  * The content model of the element as expressible in the text/html  
serialization. (The current spec draft documents the content model as  
permitted in the application/xhtml+xml serialization.)
  * The inverse of the above: The contexts in which the element may be  
used in the text/html serialization.
  * Element-specific attributes.

This text could be reused in validator UIs if suitably licensed. I  
suggest licensing the product of this documentation effort under a  
Free Software license (as opposed to the W3C document license) so that  
it can be shipped as a data file in Free Software-only software  
distributions such as Debian.

>    Best Practices

 From the F2F minutes:
"David Baron: I think there's a difference between best practice and  
convention, and it's fine to document each one, but you shouldn't  
label convention as best practice."
and
"Kevin: The best practices when the Zen Garden came out are not the  
same as they are today."

> [2]: http://www.w3.org/2007/11/09-html-wg-minutes.html#item02


-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 07:42:56 UTC