Re: HTML5 Authoring Conformance Study

On Mar 21, 2010, at 10:15 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Maciej Stachowiak, Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:21:35 -0700:
>> On Mar 21, 2010, at 7:38 AM, Shelley Powers wrote:
>
>> What I've found is that very few of the most popular pages validate
>> as their declared doctype. Out of the Alexa top 100 sites, only 8
>> have main pages that validate. So this problem is not new with HTML5,
>> though it's true that we have the opportunity to improve matters. In
>> the course of the study so far, a lot of documents seem to produce
>> fewer errors as HTML5 than as their declared doctype.
>>
>> To the best of knowledge, the rationale for most HTML4 author
>> conformance requirements is not publicly documented. But I think it
>> would be uncharitable to call the authors of HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0
>> "pedantic idiots". The rationale for excluding presentational
>> elements and attributes from the Strict DTD is somewhat documented,
>> but seems approximately equivalent to "Use CSS instead".
>
> But if Google find reason to use HTML attributes instead, then so  
> could
> I. The purpose of using CSS is so that one can be more "semantic". It
> increases "the semantics" by removing attributes that are only
> presentational.

For what it's worth, I don't personally see the value in making  
presentational elements and attributes an error. It's clear that at  
least some authors use them deliberately, and feel they have good  
reasons for doing so.

On the other hand, I can imagine it will be a frequent desire for   
otherauthors to check that they have not used any presentational  
markup. Many developers choose to use all CSS for styling, and would  
like a tool to help enforce that.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Sunday, 21 March 2010 17:27:53 UTC