Re: Design Principles Document update

At 12:04 PM 3/29/2007 -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

>I think the principles under dispute reflect some underlying fault
>lines in the web standards community.
>
>The "Visible Metadata" principle is favored by Microformats advocates
>(among others), but objected to by RDF / Semantic Web advocates.

Not so. As early as 1993, I was encoding metadata into HTML using the
LINK element to great effect. I wrote an IETF draft on REL/REV.
I am an SGML/HTML/XML guy, not an RDF guy. As I wrote earlier,
this is a design choice. We should not establish a principle that will
encumber our later design process.

>The "Mostly Semantic Markup" principle is favored by HTML advocates,
>but objected to by those who think you need XML/SGML to have "real"
>semantics.

Again, not so. I want more and better semantic markup in HTML.
I just don't want a design principle that favors it. As a technical writer
and typographer, I think that it is equally important that simple publishing
tasks remain simple. A design principle would mitigate against <i> and <b>.

On the other hand, developing a REQUIREMENT that specifies classes of
semantic markup that are needed in HTML would be welcome -- assuming
that we can agree on those classes of markup or how better to integrate 
elements
from other namespaces.

Received on Friday, 30 March 2007 04:44:34 UTC