[Bug 11466] Reword 4.4.7 The hgroup element

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11466

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
                 CC|                            |ian@hixie.ch
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #3 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 2011-01-11 00:51:04 UTC ---
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: I think it's too late to make a change of this nature without a very
compelling rationale. While it's true that public-html has been discussing
<hgroup> for a few weeks, there aren't that many participants in the
discussion, and the discussion seems to be primarily focused around people
thinking other people might not understand the feature, rather than people
themselves not understanding the feature. Such anecdotal — or even hypothetical
— confusion is not especially compelling at this stage: since the element has
been described in detail on many tutorial sites, in books, and so forth, we
would have to have very clear evidence of confusion before changing it.

In particular, I do not believe renaming <hgroup> to <hblock> is a perceptible
improvement.

Other suggestions are to change the structure, e.g. to use a subelement of <h1>
to indicate a subheading, but I believe such suggestions ignore a core
principle of our work, sometimes referred to as "pave the cowpaths": in
practice, when people have a heading and a subheading, they just use different
levels of <hx>, and so it makes imminent sense to leverage that technique.

Dropping the feature altogether would harm accessibility (without this element,
the document outlines of documents with subheadings have spurious sections), so
I don't think that's a good idea either.

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Received on Tuesday, 11 January 2011 00:51:07 UTC