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

On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, Mark Baker wrote:
> 
> How it's handled/processed depends upon the type of user agent.  
> Browsers might handle things one way, screen readers another, and 
> spiders yet another.  Sure, there might be *some* common behaviour 
> between *some* classes of agent, but there's only *two* things which are 
> common to *all* agents, past, present, and future; the shared 
> understanding of the meaning of the document, and the recognition of the 
> text/html media type.

No, this isn't true. You can define processing requirements -- indeed, 
HTML5 does define processing requirements -- without being so wishy washy 
as to rely on a "shared understanding of the meaning".

For example, there are very specific rules for how to process sections and 
headings, and how they relate to outlines. These requirements apply to a 
huge number of conformance classes -- editors, screen readers, search 
engines, validators, outliners, etc.

What obsolete features are we lacking suitable "shared understanding" for?


> > what features are lacking these requirements?
> 
> I will look for more, but for now, let's just get those two attributes 
> defined.

Which two attributes? I'm not aware of anything that's lacking suitable 
conformance criteria. Since I fixed <head profile> and <meta scheme>, I've 
not heard anyone list for any other features that need work.

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

Received on Thursday, 3 September 2009 07:28:52 UTC