Re: head@profile: another dropped attribute

Rob Sayre wrote:
> 
> On 2/5/09 1:18 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> has been made non-conforming for largely ideological reasons
> 
> Yes.

There is a pleasing trend in this mailing list towards civility and 
people taking the time to describe other's point of view in a fair and 
balanced way before proceeding to describe an alternate point of view.

Use of the term 'ideological' here bucks this trend.

An alternate way to describe the development of HTML 5 to date is that 
it has been developed starting from zero, includes only features that 
are deemed necessary to meet presented and accepted use cases, and 
operates under the rather significant constraint that such a spec, if 
followed by implementers, won't break the web.

I don't know about others, but I think that exercise and approach has 
been, and continues to be, useful.  And I believe it should continue for 
the moment.

I'm not convinced, however, that such an approach will prove anywhere 
near as useful as we progress towards Candidate Recommendation.  In 
fact, it probably needs to be abandoned before Last Call.

>>> Of course, leaving this unspecified is no worse than the status quo.
>>
>> That's a pretty low bar.
> 
> Low bar for <font>, high bar for new stuff.

This resonates with me.  And I like the fact that it deals with a 
specific example rather than an abstract concept.

An an author of content that intends to be syndicated, I have found that 
elements such as <font> tend to survive the syndication process better 
than elements such as <style> do.  There roughly are three types of feed 
readers out there: ones that simply do a strcpy of the bytes and don't 
worry about such matters as character encoding or security; ones that do 
everything humanly possible to render the content correctly; and the 
rest that simply implement simplistic white lists that might have a 
tendency to be over zealous in the quest for safety.

Simply put, <style> is a swiss-army knife and often is striped because 
of a fear of platypuses:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/06/12/how_to_consume_rss_safely

Sometimes there is a time and place for humble tags that do only one thing.

> - Rob

- Sam Ruby

Received on Thursday, 5 February 2009 11:41:51 UTC