Re: <keygen> element

On Sep 5, 2009, at 5:51 AM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> On Sep 1, 2009, at 3:34 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>>>> One thing we could do is to add a note that this feature is known  
>>>> to
>>>> be bad and is intended to be deprecated as soon as alternative
>>>> proposals arise. That would give any UA a pretty good story for not
>>>> implementing the feature for now.
>>
>> Pretty much everything in the spec will be obsoleted when better  
>> solutions
>> arise. Why would we single out<keygen> here? Do we have reason to  
>> believe
>> that new solutions will arrive any time soon?
>
> What is the justification for making the element conforming to use?  
> While it may be used enough to justify its implementation in  
> browsers, and thus having a spec defining how it works, there  
> doesn't appear to be any justification for why we should make it  
> conforming for authors to use, especially given that relatively few  
> sites actually make use of it anyway and it's not really a good  
> solution for the problem it tries to solve.
>
> I think we should make it obsolete so that we don't encourage more  
> authors to try and use it, and if the use case that it tries to  
> address is really worth addressing, and there was significant  
> interest in doing so, then it should be addressed by developing a  
> new solution that addresses it better than keygen does.

I don't think making it nonconforming is right. The sites using  
<keygen> don't have a good alternative for non-IE browsers, and  
labeling their content as nonconforming would not serve a useful  
purpose.

However, it seems reasonable to me for IE to be exempted from  
implementing it. I wouldn't say that for most other features, but in  
this case the benefit to them implementing it would be quite low, to  
the point that it's not worth fighting over.

Putting <keygen> in a separate spec would address Microsoft's request.  
HTML5 allows separate specifications to define elements and  
attributes, so I don't see "part of the language" as a very strong  
argument for keeping it in the main spec.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Saturday, 5 September 2009 17:39:41 UTC