- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2010 06:14:53 +0000 (UTC)
- To: public-html@w3.org
SUMMARY ======= Simplify the incumbent rel="" model as a last-ditch effort to see if people would be interested in using it at all. RATIONALE ========= Much research has gone into this part of the specification (some of which is cited in the escalated bug). My conclusion as editor when studying this research was that the document structure rel="" values are a mess that nobody agrees on, implemented in such a small number of software packages and used by such a small fraction of users of those packages that it would be better to dramatically reduce the number of keywords, and then map legacy keywords to their closest synonyms, than to try to continue to support the huge number of existing keywords that are in use today. I believe that the spec provides a more coherent model for moving forwards and converging existing implementations on a single model than would be achieved by implementing the proposals in the bugin the materials linked to from the bug, and in other CPs. In actual use, I would guess that WordPress is amongst the biggest users of this feature. According to the table in the bug, as I understand it, WordPress uses "index" (and "start") as defined in HTML5. It doesn't have separate index and toc pages. Indeed none of the other CMSes listed use "index" at all. Plone and DotClear use "contents", but it's not clear if the distinction they make is especially good from a usability perspective. The definitions as proposed in HTML5 intentionally disturb the status quo, but I believe that this is a worthwhile cost to try to make this feature useful. DETAILS ======= Change nothing. POSITIVE EFFECTS ================ If successful, this will make the feature more practical for users. NEGATIVE EFFECTS ================ None in practice, since the feature is so rarely used currently. CONFORMANCE CLASS CHANGES ========================= None. RISKS ===== If this is unsuccessful, we would be wasting time trying to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 3 November 2010 06:15:23 UTC