Re: LONGDESC: some current problems and a proposed solution added to the wiki

At 20:38 +0100 UTC, on 2007-07-02, James Graham wrote:

> Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>> At 09:43 +0200 UTC, on 2007-07-02, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:02:22 +0200, Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl> wrote:
>>>> How realistic is it to expect people to use <object>, given that IE
>>>> breaks interoperability?
>>> Probably slightly more realistic than expecting people to use a new
>>> element that works nowhere.
>>
>> Could you be a bit more verbose please? I can think of several things you
>> might mean, but if I need to guess, I might guess wrong.
>
> The problem is this:
>
> <object> works in most browsers except IE
> <picture> works in no browsers

Proposed new HTML 5 elements like <audio> and <video> only work in one or two
browsers today because their developers decided to bother making it work.

> A-priori then, since less effort is required to fix the bugs in one
> browser than to implement a new element in multiple browsers, it is
> better not to introduce the extra complexity of a new element.

I remember Chris Wilson saying he will not fix IE bugs if it affects an
unspecified number of users. Basically that means that until IE disappears, a
new element like <picture> is *way* more realistic than pretending that
<object> will ever be interoperable.

> Indeed,
> <picture> itself may, if specced, still not have identical
> implementations in all browsers, so not improving the current situation
> at-all.

That argument applies to every single element, except that for a new element,
that doesn't drag a history of non-interoperability with it, it applies
*less*.

> There are several ways that this argument could be countered:

[...]

Agreed.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 03:10:48 UTC