Cleaning House

I don't post much, but I do have concerns.

1.  How long do we need to continue to support deprecated tags?  HTML4
attempted to clean house by deprecating tags in lieu of CSS abilities.  Now,
eleven or so years later we're finally attempting to create a new standard,
but seems we're too concerned with how browser developers will handle
HTML4.x and XHTML1.x pages.  

HTML5 should require cleaner standards.  It should be one standard and not a
conglomerate or hodgepodge mess.  It should be easy for the novice Web
designer to understand, unlike previous standards.  The language used should
be easy for ninth graders to understand - no one should need a Ph. D. or
degree in computer programming/technologies.

2.  I'm not sure who said it, but I think my memory is correct ... if not
I'm welcome to correction.

A valid page does not need <html>, <head>, <body> or their respective
closing tags.  In a sense, the following would make a page work.

<title>Some Title</title>
<p>Some text.</p>

Browsers that support this kind of page development seem to ignore the base
requirements for proper page development.  In other words, they don't care
about standards, promoting standards, or even developing standards.  If my
view is wrong, please correct me.

While we may not have had the advantage of having Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple,
and Opera on the previous teams, we do now.  This advantage should give us a
better chance of getting the browser developers to support the standards
without division.

For example, CSS is probably the biggest problem we have for cross browser
support.  Add a border and we have browsers doing different things.  We
cannot leave interpretation to the browser developers as has been available
to them before.  If we expect the standard to work it must be concrete.

3.  Instead removing accessibility features such as table summary and
headers, it might be beneficial to examine the accessibility guidelines
before making such recommendations.  As Charles McCathieNevile points out,
table summary, headers, and ids have long been use cases for accessibility.

4.  Can't we start by cleaning up the HTML4.x and XHTML1.x standards?  After
we clean that up, I think we could then discuss new elements such as term,
canvas, and others.


Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

Regards,
Lee Roberts

Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2007 16:59:05 UTC