RE: A suggestion from the public

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009, Justin James wrote:
> 
> I really think that answer completely ignores the fundamental issue that 
> these folks have. To make it clear, they are extremely angry that the 
> *current* HTML efforts ignore this kind of work. They want a way to do 
> things in a valid, conforming, and "approved" fashion in a current 
> standard, that does not require all sorts of hoops to jump through.
> 
> Like I said, I don't expect anything to come of this in this group. But 
> I can tell you that many parts of the public "at large" is pretty 
> unhappy with the direction HTML has been headed in, because they feel 
> that it has lost its focus on creating documents in favor of becoming an 
> application platform.

The move away from <font> and towards CSS really happened long before HTML 
became an application platform and frankly is quite orthogonal to it.

Media-specific presentional markup has numerous problems when used for 
documents:

 - poor accessibility for users of other media
 - high maintenance cost
 - high file sizes
 - minimal file reuse, leading to poor caching

The user and authoring experience is significantly better when using 
media-independent HTML elements and CSS.

All this was already well understood in the late 90s when HTML4 deprecated 
presentational markup. It's not like this is a sudden change in HTML5.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2009 05:05:36 UTC