Re: ready to publish "HTML5 differences from HTML4"?

Dan,

I read the first few pages and have the following commemnts:


(1) 1. Introduction,  Para 2: W3C has never had a Recommendation called
HTML4. HTML 4.0 became a Recommendation in 1997.
This paragraph is argumentative and adds nothing to the document.

(2) 1.1 First para: I do not believe previous versions of HTML are
backwards compatible. HTML 4.01 does not support hp1, hp2, plaintext, xmp,
listing for example. These appeared in earlier versions of HTML.  I don't
understand what 'dropped' means given this and the next paragraph. It does
not sound like the conventional definition of the word 'dropped'. Perhaps
a different word should be used similar to but different from
'deprecated'.

(3) 1.1 Third para: there is no guarantee that having things clearly
defined will make any difference whatsoever to what gets implemented in
the future. Previous standards efforts can vouch for that. This is wishful
thinking. In any case, why is this para in a section called Backwards
compatible? I don't think this para really adds anything to the document.

(4) 1.2 Having two implementations of the specification does not mean that
it is usable. Somewhere in this para it should state  that the
implementations must be valid or conforming.

(5) 2. Syntax para 1. 'esoteric' is argumentative and should be removed.

(6) 2. Syntax Para 2. The parsing rules clearly cannot be largely
compatible with popular implementations when IE, Firefox and Opera manage
to parse the same  HTML fragment quite differently. For example: <em>abc
<strong>def</em>ghi</strong> is parsed differently by all three and
produces different DOMs in each case.

(7) 2. Syntax para 4. W3C does not have an XHTML1 recommendation. Second
sentence is not a sentence.

(8) 3.1 Para 1. HTML 4.01 states that the presentation of <em> and <li> 
depends on the user agent. The implication is  that they are neither 
block or inline  elements. There are constraints on where such elements
can appear in a document. They can be rendered as either block or inline
elements. Thus the change in HTML5 may be much more drastic than is
implied here as it is forcing classification on such elements as well.
Perhaps that is not what was intended.

(9) 3.2 Although 'section' may introduce structure to a document, as h1 to
h6 enclose very little, not even the <p> elements following, they cannot
be used to indicate document structure.

(10) 3.2/3.3 The rest of this section uses the phrase 'can be used'. To me
that implies the element has a certain meaning (unstated)  but can also be
used for this function. Why not say what <embed> is for rather than saying
what it 'can be used for'. The two statements are different. Why not
remove the word 'can' and 'can be' from the document completely.

Bob

Received on Monday, 25 June 2007 10:52:45 UTC