- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2012 16:01:02 +0300
- To: WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 9:08 AM, Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org> wrote: > Agreed. I support making having some kind of "trial period" like what you > describe, or a year or two or 18 months. If we do that I would prefer that > the spec include some kind of note/warning making it clear that the > attribute is experimental and may be dropped or changed significantly > within the next two years based on analysis we get back during that time. There's a non-trivial set of validator users who get very upset if the validator says that the document that previously produced no validation errors now produces validation errors--even if the new errors result from a bug fix. In my experience, handing out badges makes people more upset if the criteria behind the badge changes, but even without badges, it seems to me that the sentiment is there. Therefore, if you tell people that if they use a particular syntax their document might become invalid in the future, chances are that they will steer clear of the syntax when an easier alternative is available--just writing alt="". So adding a warning that the syntax is experimental is an almost certain way to affect the outcome of the experiment. On the other hand, not warning people and then changing what's valid is likely to make people unhappy. It seems to me that running an experiment like this will either result in a failed experiment, unhappy people or both. If an experiment on this topic was to be run, what would you measure how would you interpret the measurements? -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Sunday, 5 August 2012 13:01:31 UTC