- From: Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 12:57:03 +0100
- To: public-html WG <public-html@w3.org>
Karl Dubost writes: > I don't believe having a metaname for wysiwyg editor is solving > anything at all. I think it's: * We want that an author of a valid HTML5 document isn't permitted to use certain 'presentational' things, instead putting semantic mark-up in the HTML and using CSS to achieve the desired presentation. * Some HTML is generated now by users directly, but by applications, such as word processors with a 'save as HTML' option. Some of those applications permit users to specify presentational output without giving a reason for doing so (for example, a user may consistently highlight all defining instances of terms in blue, or use a different typeface for headings, but there's no way the application is aware of this). So when generating the HTML the application cannot follow the rules for authors writing HTML by hand; if the user has only told the application to make something blue, all the app can do is generate HTML which specifies its blueness. So _some_ HTML-generating software can't meet all the author requirements. * That software isn't going to go away. Whatever this group decides, such apps will still be used. * Given such an app's existence, it's better if it meets all the _other_ author requirements in the spec, the things that it does have enough information to do. So the spec acknowledges the few things that such apps cannot meet and declares documents they generate still to be valid HTML5 if they meet everything else. * The meta tag enables documents to be distinguished, so as to know which leve of conformance they were aiming for. > Saying that only wysiwyg editors need/put font tag is ignoring the > fact that document move from one tool to the other. A document is not > edited by one tool, but can be edited by multiple type of tools at > different times. True, but that doesn't prevent such binary tagging from being used: the tag indicates the document contains some content which was generated purely from presentational direction by a user and so may be doing things that hand-written HTML5 shouldn't and be missing relevant semantic information. So if any of the document has been generated by such software, the tag still applies (until such a time that all such-generated HTML has been hand edited and it's no longer relevant). But ... we could still achieve the distinction in validation levels without documents self-identifying. Given that the full requirements are a superset of those for non-semantic editors, it's possible for a validator simply to check a document against all the rules and then give one of three responses: * This document conforms to valid HTML5. Congratulations, here's a logo. * This document is acceptable HTML5 if it were generated by software which couldn't know any better. If that's the case, then here's a (different) logo. But if you wrote this by hand then it isn't good enough, here's some things to fix ... * This isn't HTML5. Here's why not ... > This is a shorcut, I have not made in the proposal. :) > <meta name="conform" content="html5-bp"> > is not for assessing the quality of the document. That would not be > very effective and easily spoofed. Indeed. That's why if a meta tag is to be used to distinguish the two levels of documents it needs to be the 'lessor' level that is labelled, such that the label is 'I know I'm substandard; please be nice to me', rather than 'I'm claiming to be really good'. Smylers
Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2007 13:03:04 UTC