Re: HTML 5 Authoring Guidelines Proposal the use of the section element and its potential impact on screen reader users

On Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:00:30 +0100, Dr. Olaf Hoffmann  
<Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de> wrote:
> In this situation - with two completely different models to structure
> content it should be no surprise for authors to get surprising or
> nonsense results from the viewer if they start to mix it and it would
> be even more educational for authors, if they get different results
> for index/outline with different viewers.

Typical authors don't use different viewsers, however. Historically it's  
also clear that authors will do something wrong regardless of what the  
specification allows or disallows. A survey Ian Hickson did indicated that  
about 95% of the Web content has a syntax error of some sorts. Let alone  
validation errors due to incorrect content models, etc. (And that's not  
counting the numerous errors in CSS, HTTP, etc.)

How these errors are handled has historically been the case of reverse  
engineering the market leader (because that's what authors code against).  
This costs a lot of resources and leads to undesirable error handling. As  
a result there's a push from implementors to properly define error  
handling so we can spend those resources on something more productive.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2007 15:20:13 UTC