- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:10:08 +0200
- To: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Cc: "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch>, public-html@w3.org
On Nov 14, 2008, at 20:42, Mark Baker wrote: > I think we've had this discussion before 8-) > > As often happens, Roy says it better than I could; > > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Nov/0430.html It seems to me that Web authors seek to elicit browser behaviors when they write HTML/CSS/JS. They don't just put abstract meaning out there. (In the common case; I'm sure you can show an existence proof of the opposite.) There are other kinds of Web clients, too, but generally people publish content primarily to enable people to access the content using browsers and the ability of other programs to consume the content is just a bonus. (Of course, there are exceptions: Certain types of black hat SEO target the behavior of search engines and the content doesn't need to be useful in a browser.) I don't think it's useful to try to decouple "the language" from "browser behavior" normatively. However, I think that producers of HTML documents would benefit from an informative document that gives instruction on how to produce conforming HTML5 documents. That is, the following the guidance of the informative document should result in conforming documents but the guidance wouldn't need to give all the possible ways in which a document could be conforming. I think we don't need a separate normative language spec but instead we need an informative authoring guide ("primer" in the W3C lingo, although that word isn't great in the title of a document aimed at global audiences). We already even have an editor (Lachy) signed up for the authoring guide. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Saturday, 15 November 2008 12:10:51 UTC