- From: Tina Holmboe <tina@greytower.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 13:03:42 +0200
- To: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>
- Cc: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@royal-tunbridge-wells.org>, www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org
On Sun, May 06, 2007 at 12:38:18PM +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote: > >As a standards organisation, the W3C defines what /should/ be done, > >rather than merely rubber-stamping what is an actually an artifact > >of uninformed usage, poor tools, and a lack of concern for accessibility. > > We have to remain realistic as well. If people more often incorrectly use > something it may be that just need to accept that. The language should be > designed for as many people as possible, uninformed or not. Ivory tower > viewpoints don't really improve the web. /Realistically/ speaking, if you take the time to actually study raw markup used on the web, means this: <div class="header1"> and <b style="position: absolute ; top: 150px ;">Welcome!</b> So to answer the question: > # Are the semantics defined solely by the specification (Prescriptivism) > # or informed by actual use (Descriptivism)? For human languages, > # linguists generally take the Descriptivist approach. This turns out to > # be a more productive way to interpret artifacts in human languages such > # as English. "Descriptivism" is of no use what so ever in defining standards and specifications. While humans may - and I say MAY - be able to understand gobbledegook, browsers are not. When one party "invent" interpretations of anything, another party cease understanding it. The Tower of Babel is a good myth to read up on for us who work with markup languages. The above markup examples are taken from real-life documents. As a sighted human I could easily infer that they were headers. As has been pointed out repeatedly: a non-sighted user does not have the luxury of precise guesswork based on visual clues. Linguists may study the way language change, but /teachers/ teach it the way it /is/, now, not the way it may become a decade from now when someone has made "fnuffr" to mean discussing in vain on a W3C mailing-list. -- - Tina Holmboe
Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 11:03:46 UTC