- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Wed, 02 May 2007 03:26:43 +1000
- To: tina@greytower.net
- CC: www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org
Tina Holmboe wrote: > On 1 May, Lachlan Hunt wrote: > >>> The spec authors looked at what browsers supported, documented it, >>> and called it a standard. >> Could you please explain how you think the process should work? > > "This group will maintain and produce incremental revisions to > the HTML specification." > > I'm sure you recognise the quote. > > So lets do just that. Start with the currently HTML 4.01 Strict, and > /revise/ it... Starting over with HTML4 would effectively discard 3 years of good, solid work that has gone into HTML5, and take us right back to where we were in 1999. That is not acceptable. >>> In other words the WG is to study, and document, both good and bad >>> practices of browsers and authors today, and tailor the specification >>> to allow them? >> The specification will be tailored to *support* the bad things, which >> browsers are required to do regardless of what the spec says. However, >> the spec will not necessarily allow such things in conforming documents. > > The specification will /support/ bad ideas, but not /allow/ bad ideas? I think you misinterpreted my use of the word "support". I meant as in how to handle it, not approve of its use. Let me try to rephrase: The specification's user agent requirements will define precisely how browsers need to handle markup, whether it's good or bad, but the authoring requirements will not allow the use of bad markup in conforming documents. This seems to be the source of contention in the current debate. For the spec to be implementable, it needs to define conformance requirements for UAs, including error handling and how to handle both existing and future content. It also needs to define authoring requirements. This is where you should be focussing your attention, as they are the requirements that define what markup is considered good and can be used, but is just a subset of what browsers are required to support. However, it appears that you, and several others, are objecting to the inclusion of user agent conformance requirements, using arguments based around authoring requirements. We need to be careful not to conflate these issues when discussing them. Personally, I agree with you in principle that HTML5 should not encourage the further proliferation of purely presentational markup. The separation of semantics and presentation is certainly a useful goal, and is something we should strive for where practical, though I don't take such a hard line stance on it as you do. We can get the authoring requirements right this time around, but defining authoring requirements that disallow the use of erroneous markup, does not remove the requirements for user agents to support it. We must not let our ideals about developing a good markup language for authors get in the way of UA conformance criteria. > The /specification of a markup language/ should /not/ "support" bad > practice. /Browsers/ should support bad practice. We clearly agree that browsers need to support existing content, but the problem is that there is no spec that defines how. Without such a spec, browsers are forced to guess and reverse engineer each other. That approach clearly has not worked. Browser are not interoperable, yet that is precisely what we need to achieve. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 17:26:55 UTC