Re: The Complexity Argument (was: Re: Request to publish HTML+RDFa (draft 3) as FPWD)

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 8:47 PM, Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net> wrote:
> After doing this, it appears to me that the complexity of HTML5, relative to
> HTML4, is a significant new burden on the "a" group, with the result that
> HTML5 could cause a large shift in HTML authoring towards the professional
> coders.

I don't think this is correct.  The spec is huge, but content authors
don't have to pay attention to it.  If they want to, they can safely
continue to use their old tag-soup HTML4 documents with quirks-mode
doctypes and still use new HTML5 features like <video>.  We'd like it
if they read the spec and ensured their documents were valid, but
HTML5 is very much designed so that authors don't have to pay
attention to anything except the new features they'd like to use.

(In fact, I'm currently speaking to someone in #whatwg who's
complaining that <video height=70% width=70% align=center> doesn't
work as expected.  Apparently he's happily using HTML5 without being
overly concerned about understanding the spec!)

Received on Monday, 21 September 2009 09:46:06 UTC