Re: Summary: Naming Issue, Proposals

aloha, jirka!

your response leaves me with a question: why is it a good thing 
that, quote: HTML5 is less canonical then HTML 4.01 because it has much 
more relaxed syntax unquote

how does more relaxed syntax assist anyone excecpt a lazy page 
author or an incompetent authoring tool?  the stricter the 
syntax, the tighter the specification -- one of my objections 
to the HTML5 draft is that there are a lot of assumptions made 
about the capability of Assistive Technologies (ATs) to quote 
implicitly unquote group items of a similar nature, when what 
ATs actually require is EXPLICIT grouping mechanisms...

would you put your steering wheel in the hands of your GPS system,
if you had one?  i wouldn't put my online life in the hands of 
a collection of loose assumptions and implied structure, which is 
one of the reasons why i have formally objected to using the HTML5
document as our base document.

it is the ambiguities of past iterations of HTML that must be 
addressed, before NEW elements and attributes are introduced; 
ambiguities such as, how exactly should accesskey work (my answer:
give the user a list of accesskeys -- generated either by the UA
or AT -- and allow the user to assign a modifier key (and even 
modify author-set accesskeys that interfere with the operation of 
their UA or AT) AND whether or not to have focus moved to the object 
for which an accesskey has been defined, or whether it should activate 
that for which the accesskey has been defined...

a for/id relationship between abbreviations needs to be added, as 
the HTML4x spec assumed that expansion of an abbreviation once 
could lead to its reuse, but defined no mechanism for this, other 
than an implicit understanding on the part of the UA or AT that 
after the first expansion, the expansion should be universally 
applied to that abbreviation...  an external referencing mechanism, 
such as that used by CSS, could allow for the use of a site-wide 
expansion file, so that expansions need to be explicitly stated 
in the external expansion sheet, and applied to documents as per 
the user's wish or needs, which requires an EXPLICIT binding 
mechanism in order that a site-wide expansion look-up be successful 
and acurate.

i could go on and on, but the tip of the iceberg should suffice 
as warning to the WG...

gregory.

--------------------------------------------------------------
CRITIC, n.  A person who boasts himself hard to please because
nobody tries to please him.
                     -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
--------------------------------------------------------------
Gregory J. Rosmaita: oedipus@hicom.net
   Oedipus' Online Complex: http://my.opera.com/oedipus/
      Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/index.html
--------------------------------------------------------------

---------- Original Message -----------
From: Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz>
To: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>
Cc: public-html@w3.org
Sent: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 18:11:34 +0200
Subject: Re: Summary: Naming Issue, Proposals

> Gregory J. Rosmaita wrote:
> 
> > since the technical recommendation we are working on currently 
> > is assumed to be the last iteration of HTML, i propose that we
> > call it Canonical HTML, and leave numbering out of it altogether
> > (unless, someday, we issue Canonical HTML 1.1 to incorporate 
> > corrections, errata, etc.
> 
> I object against calling it canonical HTML. Let's not repeat past
> mistakes. In 1999 W3C announced that HTML 4.01 is the latest 
> version of HTML ever published. All new development will be done 
> on XHTML branch. Now 8 years later we are working on, hmmm what 
> a surprise, HTML 5.
> 
> > PRECEDENTS:
> > 
> > Canonical XML 1.0
> >   * http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n
> > 
> > Cononical XML 1.1
> >   * http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-c14n11/
> 
> Thanks, but these are counter-precedents. XML C14N defines one very
> normalized form of serialization which can be used if you want to
> compare documents that might have differences only in a syntax sugar
> 
> (insignificant whitespaces, attribute order, ...), but their 
> content is the same. In this sense HTML5 is less canonical then 
> HTML 4.01 because it has much more relaxed syntax.
> 
> 		Jirka
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>   Jirka Kosek      e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz      http://xmlguru.cz
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------- End of Original Message -------

Received on Thursday, 28 June 2007 17:01:38 UTC