Re: Cleaning House

James Graham wrote:

> Browser vendors have made it clear that all those tags will still be 
> supported in releases for the foreseeable future. There is nothing this 
> working group can do about that; we have no sticks and I can't imagine 
> what would constitute a appetising enough carrot. Therefore we have a 
> binary choice: specify how the deprecated and obsoleted features should 
> work in UAs and so make the web better by improving interoperability or 
> refuse to specify how they should work and maintain the status quo where 
> any interoperability that happens to exist is the result of tedious, 
> error prone, reverse engineering of market-leading implementations.

I'm missing how subjecting B, I etc to the same processing rules and 
definitions as any other unknown/removed/deprecated/obsoleted element 
would break interoperability. By "how they should work", do you mean 
"how they should be presented"?

> Note that, as has been said before, this is an entirely separate issue 
> from whether we should make these tags conforming in documents. For 
> example, there is no need for a document containing <big> to pass a 
> conformance check just because UAs have some behavior when they 
> encounter it.

So should there be a need for a document containing <small>, for 
instance, to pass conformance checks? Maybe I'm missing something, but 
why can't the reasoning that saw the removal of TT, BIG and co be 
applied in the same way to the contentious B, I etc? Is it just because 
more people are (ab)using the ones that were kept?

> Creating a culture where authors naturally value conformance checking, 
> plus sound arguments as to /why/ using deprecated/obsolete features and 
> invalid markup is bad /for the author/ are the best carrots we have to 
> make authors clean up their own markup output.

And this argument works just as well if the contentious (presentational) 
elements that remain in the proposed spec are also removed, no?

-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2007 22:59:12 UTC