Re: H:TML draft for FPWD consideration

On 02/01/10 11:47, Michael(tm) Smith wrote:
> This is request to the working group to consider the following document for
> publication as a First Public Working Draft:
> 
>   HTML: The Markup Language
>   http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/

+1 - Awesome work, Mike!

I asked some of the folks in our engineering team who do quite a bit of
web development, but who are fairly detached from the whole HTML5 spec
creation sausage factory, to take a look at this spec and the other
HTML5 spec, side-by-side, to find out which one they would find more
useful for day-to-day activity.

I'm assuming that the purpose of this document is mainly day-to-day help
for regular Web developers, but didn't say anything about that to get
some unprompted feedback on how they viewed both documents.

Overall, they liked the simpler layout of the H:TML draft with the
following exceptions:

* All of them wanted examples in the pages, demonstrating how to
correctly use a specific element. They liked that the big HTML5 spec had
examples. They also mentioned that their eyes would glaze over when
reading about the specifics in the big HTML5 spec - they were primarily
looking for things like "how do I use this correctly" and "what do I put
in each attribute".

* They complained that there was no type information, which is
interesting. The type information is specified via a link - you can
click on the type and go to another page, but it's not on the page
itself. So they were unsure whether or not to put in a URL, text, or a
specially formatted string (such as CSS) into the attributes for each
new HTML5 element.

* One of the devs said that it would be nice if it were made clear what
the best coding practices were for particular elements. Things like,
"you should always include an @alt tag on an IMG element" or "you should
provide an @id for H1-H6 to aid people that would like to navigate
directly to the section on the page".

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Bitmunk 3.2.1 Released - Video and Data Sales
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2010/01/31/bitmunk-3-2-1/

Received on Monday, 1 February 2010 21:14:33 UTC