Re: ISSUE-41/ACTION-97 decentralized-extensibility

2009/10/1 Laurens Holst <laurens.nospam@grauw.nl>:
> Re. concerns that XML namespaces are too difficult for authors; what part of
> HTML5 do you think is /simple/ for authors?

Almost all of the important parts.  Generally, if you read through a
few simple tutorials, fiddle around a bit, and Google if you get
stuck, you can produce mostly working (although probably totally
invalid) HTML pages without having any idea what you're actually
doing.  Which is good.  Authors shouldn't have to be expected to
actually read specs to write a web page.  If it required more effort
for a beginner to get a web page working, more people would get locked
into proprietary solutions like Dreamweaver that try to make it
easier, and that's a standards failure.

I don't see why it would be okay to add more confusing things just
because some existing things are confusing, though.

> Really, HTML5 has such
> complexities (just to name one, <script src=""></script> vs. <script
> src=""/>, the latter failing rather miserably),

I don't think that's particularly complicated in practice.  The latter
fails miserably, so you look at some other page's source for
reference, and in five minutes you've figured out the correct answer
by trial and error.  In any event, we're stuck with the behavior
whether we like it or not, so I don't see how it supports your point.

I'll also point out that if you didn't have the whole misguided
XHTML-even-as-text/html movement, this particular confusion would
never have arisen.  It's not the fault of HTML itself -- the problem
certainly didn't exist before it became common to teach XHTML 1
instead of HTML 4.

Received on Thursday, 1 October 2009 14:26:01 UTC