- From: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2007 23:05:40 +0200
- To: public-html@w3.org
At 15:01 +0200 UTC, on 2007-07-28, Anne van Kesteren wrote: [...] > I think it will be easier for features > to become adopted if they don't require a lot of rethinking, but rather > can be incrementally deployed. I think that's one of the reasons it's > important to look how authors are solving problems now. I fully agree that current authoring practice should be taken into account. But we should not step in the trap of ignoring the *reason* for a specific authoring practice. A certain authoring practice may well be due to limitations of the current spec, or UA bugs. Such things cannot be measured by merely looking at authors' markup. It may well be that a certain practice would disappear when HTML5 provides a mechanism that authors find easier to use and/or is implemented correctly across UAs. Consider for example the shift from authoring presentational HTML to making more use of CSS. The HTML spec hasn't change during that transition. UA support for CSS has. > I suppose it's a bit like social science. Getting statistics on what's > currently being done to see how we can improve the situation without > radically changing it. I agree such research would be interesting and valuable. But merely looking at code, without knowing the author's rationale behind it, will give a flawed picture. It may well be that, for a given authoring practice, authors are in fact, consciuously or not, waiting for a radical change. (Such as their shift towards using CSS suggests.) -- Sander Tekelenburg The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
Received on Saturday, 28 July 2007 21:10:26 UTC