[Bug 18669] Switch from is= to <tag if a decision has been reached among implementers

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18669

--- Comment #44 from Dimitri Glazkov <dglazkov@chromium.org> ---
I’ve been poring over replies on bug and various private mails and chats,
trying to pieces together the landscape. As far as I can see it, there are two
major opposing camps (and as it usually happens, many stragglers and
undecideds):

1) The "liberal" camp, whose dwellers see custom tags as HTML’s salvation. They
cite top sites and their wholly imperative architecture as the evidence of “the
battle of HTML” already have been lost and the need for flexibility/carrot to
entice the authors back to declarative land. The emerged, reborn markup will
not be “HTML as we know it”, but it will be closer to HTML than imperative
code.

2) The "conservative" camp, where the custom tags are seen as a looming threat
to the existing HTML semantics. They cite the general success of existing HTML
semantics on the Web (Google search as one example) and the danger of custom
tags to incentivise the authors to invent their own semantics and obscuring
HTML semantics in the process.

For conservatives, the worst-case scenario includes a whole new breed of markup
where documents no longer contain any recognizable HTML semantics, and as such
does not seem much better than the imperative approach that top sites use now. 

To prevent this, the conservatives insist that custom elements must come with
guides or hurdles that direct the authors to keep HTML semantics exposed as
long as reasonably possible.

For liberals, the worst-case scenario is that the hurdles are too tall and the
majority of authors simply rejects custom elements, continuing the same
practices.

Essentially, the liberals ask to "Say what you mean" with custom tags, and
conservatives worry that it will result in "I heard you, but I have no clue
what it means".

One can suppose that the discourse boils down to the height of hurdles erected
in order to guide the authors.

In the latest proposal
(https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18669#c36), the hurdles are:

1) To encourage using existing HTML semantics, the author has to use “is”
syntax to extend existing HTML elements

2) To discourage replacing HTML semantics with whole new vocabularies, the
author may only inherit from CustomElement (which is Element with some useful
bits of HTMLElement) when making new tags.

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Received on Tuesday, 15 January 2013 21:55:06 UTC