- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:38:18 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Cc: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Thu, 17 Jun 2010, Daniel Glazman wrote: > > > > "Tables must not be used as layout aids. Historically, some Web > > authors have misused tables in HTML as a way to control their page > > layout. This usage is non-conforming" > > Thanks for letting me know. I am then officially objecting to that last > sentence of this paragraph in the spec, and I want it to be removed. > > No conformance checker can test this so this cannot be a conformance > criterium. A content editing tool will never be able to enforce such a > criterium. The specification makes a distinction between machine-checkable conformance criteria and non-machine-checkable conformance criteria. There are a number of the latter; the above is not the only one. Conformance checkers are explicitly not required to check these conformance criteria, and editors are explicitly not required to enforce compliance to them. This is defined in the conformance section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/complete/infrastructure.html#conformance-requirements There are generally speaking two ways to approach the problem of people misusing markup: either define that their documents mean something different than they think it means, or define that using the wrong markup is incorrect. When advocating good markup use, in my experience it is much easier to convince an author if you can point to a place in the spec that outright says that their document is invalid than if you have to convince them that their document means something different than they think. The latter is too "meta" for many authors. This is why the specification has these requirements. I think it would be reasonable to suggest that the spec should make it clearer which requirements are intended to be machine-checkable without user interaction and which today could only be checked by someone able to determine the author's intent. Labeling each such requirement would be a significant amount of work, but if you think it would be worth it anyway, I recommend filing a bug requesting this. HTH, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 17 June 2010 22:38:51 UTC