relevance of diverse HTML authoring practices [was: Versioning re-visited ...]

On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 18:48 +0200, Roger Johansson wrote:
[...]
> >> 1. poor authoring practices should NOT sway or inform our decisions
> >
> > I for one am not the least bit interested in helping to design
> > a markup language for those too lazy to think : authors who merely
> > "copy-and-paste the boilerplate text" should /not/ be the target
> > of our efforts;
> 
> Good to see I am not alone in having this opinion. I am yet to see a  
> single acceptable argument for breaking or refusing to improve HTML  
> because some people cannot be bothered to learn it.

Some have gone so far as to suggest "poor authoring practices
should NOT sway or inform our decisions".

Whether they should sway our decisions or not, they certainly
should inform our decisions.

Our success criteria include...
 "Availability of multiple, independent, interoperable implementations
  User community and industry adoption of the group deliverables."
  -- http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html

It does not say "the part of the user community that makes
a serious effort to stay informed about W3C specifications".

This specification effort is part of a feedback loop between
implementors and authors; authors are very much influenced
by how browsers and other tools behave, and tool builders
are influenced -- constrained, even -- by authoring practices.
We can influence them to a certain degree... we're fortunate to
have a number of HTML implementation projects directly represented
in this working group... but the HTML user community is so large
that we're really only even in contact with a small portion of it.

Speaking personally, my goal is that the specification we
deliver is sufficient that new implementations based on it
will interoperate with a critical mass of the deployed content
on the web. Much (most?) of that content reflects
poor authoring practices. These practices are very much
relevant considerations for our design decisions.

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Saturday, 23 June 2007 15:04:16 UTC