Re: Presentational markup

On 03/24/2010 06:49 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:32:08 +0100, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
> wrote:
>> On 03/24/2010 06:40 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> On Mar 24, 2010, at 3:37 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Oct/0961.html
>>>
>>> Awesome, thanks for the reference!
>>
>> Agreed. My problem is consistency. I see some of the same people who
>> have stated that longdesc has been tried and failed for over 10 years
>> advocating that such markup be considered non-conforming, and I see
>> evidence that a substantial number of sites are willfully violating
>> admonitions against presentational markup... again over 10 years later.
>
> But it is also easy to find a whole lot that do it correctly. There lots
> of sites dedicated to showing of such sites even, including specifically
> for those that target HTML5 conformance. It is vastly different from the
> longdesc attribute in that respect as far as I can tell.
>
>> One of the things that attracted me to HTML5 was that it purported to
>> document the web as it exists as opposed to other efforts at the W3C
>> which intended to change the web to their vision as to how it should be.
>
> Can't we have a mix of pragmatism and idealism?

Could we?  Yes.  But my observation is that what we tend to have here is 
a situation of what I call "conjugating adjectives".  You know how in 
English one says "I am", "you are", "he is", ...?  What I observe is 
people who have a tendency to take this a step further and go "I am 
idealistic", "You are dogmatic", "they are orthodox".

My preference is that we find a common basis that we can all agree with, 
and then to provide sets of additional constraints that people can 
advocate and adopt.  To get to that point, we will need everybody here 
to be a little less dogmatic, and a little more tolerant of each others 
ideals.  I realize that as that requires everybody to give a little, 
that is a tall order.

At the present time, I am not personally optimistic that the set of sets 
of additional constraints is the empty set.  And clearly if cardinality 
of the set of sets is larger than one or there dividing line does not 
approximate the difference between what the self-named "super friends" 
advocate and what the web actually deploys, then using the xmlns 
attribute is unlikely to be the correct approach.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2010 23:22:43 UTC