- From: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:18:56 +0100
- To: "Sam Ruby" <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- Cc: "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs@apple.com>, "Leif Halvard Silli" <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>, "David Singer" <singer@apple.com>, "Henri Sivonen" <hsivonen@iki.fi>, "Philip Taylor" <pjt47@cam.ac.uk>, "HTMLwg WG" <public-html@w3.org>
On Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:21:50 +0100, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> wrote: > On 03/24/2010 06:49 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote: >> On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:32:08 +0100, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> >> wrote: >>> One of the things that attracted me to HTML5 was that it purported to >>> document the web as it exists as opposed to other efforts at the W3C >>> which intended to change the web to their vision as to how it should >>> be. >> >> Can't we have a mix of pragmatism and idealism? > > Could we? Yes. But my observation is that what we tend to have here is > a situation of what I call "conjugating adjectives". You know how in > English one says "I am", "you are", "he is", ...? What I observe is > people who have a tendency to take this a step further and go "I am > idealistic", "You are dogmatic", "they are orthodox". What I meant is that HTML5 is not completely about the Web as it exists. It still sets goals. Instead of describing the various ways in which implementations are different from each other, it sets a path for how they can converge over time, adjusted along the way as appropriate. I think this is important in order to make progress. Likewise setting goals for content authors make sense to me. Of course we need to evaluate over time whether they can be met, but HTML5 just started to get some traction. Transitional has been the line of designer/developer advocacy for over a decade; I do not think we should be surprised there is plenty of it on the Web. HTML5 offers a break from this and given the reactions of designers/developers so far, it seems to be positively received. I've yet to see blog posts asking for the return of the <font> element or cellspacing="" on <table>. -- Anne van Kesteren http://annevankesteren.nl/
Received on Thursday, 25 March 2010 11:00:18 UTC