- From: Mike Schinkel <w3c-lists@mikeschinkel.com>
- Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 01:52:28 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org
To all: The debate I triggered regarding <indent> has evolved to be a debate fundamentally involving the value systems of those people debating and not the specific technical aspect of the proposed element. Rather than continue that debate in the guise of <indent>, for which a technical debate should occur, I propse we bring the fundamental issues that turned it into a "religious" debate to the surface and get a consensus decision. I will attempt to frame the debate here, but I'm sure I'll mis-characterize a portion of the debate so I expect others to step in to clarify. 1.) On the one hand there are those that believe that HTML should be about content/semantics and not about presentation. Those people (appear to) believe that, while presentational elements do exist in HTML by legacy they should be deprecated and nothing presentation in nature should be added moving forward. Further, those people believe that all content authors should be required to learn CSS. We'll call this group the "semantans." 2.) On the other hand there are those that believe that HTML is about empowering people to publish, and part of publishing is presentation. While this group believes that semantic markup is a good and worthy goal it is also believes a pragmatic approach is warranted and understands that a.) many people will not be bothered to learn CSS for presentation and will thus misuse other semantic elements, and b.) that not every semantic need will be captured and converted into appropriate markup by this working process and thus "catch-all" elements are warranted, possibly with freeform attributes as in the example below to let future analysis be performed. We'll call this group the "pragmatans." <indent rel="whatever"> </indent> Unfortunately this debate is just like the "abortion debate in real life; i.e. the "pro-lifers" say "no abortions, period" whereas the "pro-choicers" want abortions to be rare, but available. Similarly the "semantans" are absolutists whereas the "pragmatans" value semantics but see value in pure presentational markup for basic document layout. In summary I'd like to propose we determine as a working group a consensus of the issue of Semantic vs. Presentational markup to allow WG participants to refer to it in the future to stop these types of endless debates. As such, I would suggest it would probably be of interest to all WG participants. Respectfully submitted, -- -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/ http://www.welldesignedurls.org http://atlanta-web.org - http://t.oolicio.us
Received on Saturday, 28 April 2007 05:52:53 UTC