Re: HTML5 script start tag should select appropriate content model according to src

Philip & Le Khanh wrote:

> Hardly the sort of document to which one could reasonably
> refer the Lynx developers, let alone the sort of document
> that "browsers will be implementing", IMHO.

I'm afraid I have to disagree there, in terms of what Lynx users want. 
They want to be able access what is actually on the web, and are already 
at a disadvantage by being text only and lacking scripting.

With most of the major players, except Microsoft involved, and with 
Microsoft as a silent partner, because their market dominance means the 
standard has to maximise bugwise compatibility with IE, it's tbeir best 
chance of having something that behaves the way the authors see their 
pages behaving.

Unfortunately, the web is not a normal standards environment.  Most of 
the people authoring content are just not used to the idea of writing to 
standards.  I think they largely come from an arts school background and 
  work in terms of what actually happens when they apply media to the 
medium.

The bad thing is that they are just pandering to the market wants, and 
the money is basically with HTML as a presentational medium, not with 
the semantic web.  In my view, the HTML and CSS sides of W3C (although 
not the SVG one) took a higher moral stance and tried to make HTML a 
medium for communication, not just a medium for advertising, and that is 
being lost.

The good thing, possibly, is that it may distract people from the 
inappropriate use of XHTML, which is putting so much not-well formed 
content into the wild that real XML browsers may be unable to reject 
badly formed input.

I think, in a contorted sort of way, the real fault lies with Adobe.  I 
think they failed to realise that the early Netscape era HTML's 
advantages of:

- being new and fashionable;
- being possible to hand code, and later having free to use
   authoring tools;
- having web links.

outweighed the fact that they already had a product, Acrobat, which was 
good at meeting marketing publication needs.

As a result, a tool that was intended to help communicate information 
became a tool for writing marketing copy.  A semantic tool became a 
presentational one.  The result is one which is inordinately complex 
because it is a tool being used for the wrong job.

The only thing that HTML really contributed to that market is 
reflowability, but if things had gone the Acrobat route, I think it 
would just have been considered an extra gimmick.

Received on Monday, 23 April 2007 20:49:04 UTC