A suggestion from the public

One of the readers of my column at TechRepublic sent in an item to me, that
he asked that I raise to the group on his behalf. While I am sure that it
will not go far in this group, I feel that it is my responsibility to pass
it along.

In a nutshell, he asked that we find a way to signal a more traditional
style of HTML, one similar to HTML 3, in which CSS is not needed to perform
presentational markup. His suggestion was to use a tag that would indicate
"everything within here should be treated like older HTML", or possibly to
use something like DOCTYPE (if not DOCTYPE itself) to indicate that a
document be treated according to older rules.

Again, this is something that I am passing along at the request of a reader,
so take it as you will.

That being said, while I *personally* understand why the
presentation/semantic separation achieved with CSS is a major improvement, I
have been getting a lot of feedback from readers who share frustration that
the ability to generate a simple document using HTML is getting lost in the
quest to transform HTML into a development platform. I agree with that
notion, in that the bar has been raised significantly just to get a simple
"Hello World" onto the Web since HTML 4. I know that at this stage of the
HTML 5 game, it's a bit late, but I do feel a duty to raise it as a
potential topic for discussion.

Thanks!

J.Ja

Received on Monday, 26 October 2009 04:39:30 UTC