Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 6:24 AM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> It is pointless to provide semantics of elements (or other features) that
> are obsolete

Obsolescence is a forward-looking statement; don't use these features
in the future.  That's fine and good, and I agree with the list of
obsolete features assembled in HTML 5.

Obsolescence does not change the meaning of existing content which
happens to use those features, nor does it mandate that existing
content be updated to remove them.

> other than the semantics that form the element's (or the
> feature's) normative user-agent conformance criteria, since the only
> effect of such semantics is in deciding whether the element (or feature)
> is being used correctly, and obsolete elements (and features) can never be
> used correctly, since they are obsolete and must never be used at all.

It is a fact that obsolete features are in wide use today by content
served as text/html.  Therefore, any HTML specification(s) normatively
referenced by the media type registration needs to define what that
content means.

FWIW, I had a look through the obsolete list last night and found some
which had properly defined semantics.  For example, "plaintext" was
defined to mean the same thing as "pre".  That's good, and what we
should strive for for the examples given by Julian.

Mark.

Received on Tuesday, 1 September 2009 15:32:10 UTC