[Bug 24591] Make W3C HTML5 spec clearly and correctly state that table@border is obsolete & invalid (nonconforming)

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=24591

--- Comment #12 from Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net> ---
As https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=24705 tracks what needs to be
done for HTML 5.0, I'll comment here on what I feel should be done for HTML 5.1
and beyond.

Chair hat: OFF

For more than a decade, there has been an attempt to identify "presentational"
markup and deprecate it in favor of CSS.  As near as I can tell, the reasons
for this are that pages intended to be accessed by a browser are typically part
of a site, and factoring the presentation to a separate file is good design. 
Fair enough.

But browsers aren't the only user agents that consume HTML.  Syndication,
e-books, and e-mail are other examples.  Even if these ultimately use the same
rendering engine, the use cases are different.  After all, the deprecation
being proposed here isn't due to the markup in question not being implemented
interoperably -- in fact the HTML 5 specification requires that it be
implemented.

Even on the web, use cases vary.  While google.com doesn't use @border, if you
attempt to validate that page, you will find a bunch of related errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

My take is that the people who crafted that page understand their use case very
very well.  My understanding is that they want that page to be self contained,
and to be expressed in a minimum number of packets when compressed, and they
have made their choices accordingly.

If you accept my premise that these authors know their use case very well, and
despite this endorse that the W3C HTML specification disallow these usages,
then the inevitable result is that the validators that match the spec are off
less utility.

The validation results for google.com are a good example of this.  Amongst the
23 "errors" I see four clear problems: elements such as <p> and <div> being
used as children of span, and <nobr> being used as a child of <div>.

It is a shame that this signal is lost in the noise.

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Received on Monday, 24 February 2014 22:15:02 UTC