Re: Rethinking HTML 5 (Was: Re: Semicolon after entities)

On 5/1/07, Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> wrote:

> 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
[snip]
> 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.

Yes. My take is that adding presentational elements and attributes to
HTML 5 would be a step backwards for authoring. HTML 5 should promote
the modeling the logical structure and semantics of information, not
its presentation. Presentation is the job of CSS.

Deprecate existing presentational markup while allowing it to
gracefully degrade in user agents. When putting in any new 'features',
do it in a way that older browsers and other user agents can still
access basic content .

Best Regards,
Laura

Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2007 12:21:22 UTC