Re: AuthConfReq: Presentational Markup

On 03/28/2010 09:21 AM, Kornel Lesiński wrote:
> On 28.03.2010, at 13:24, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>
>> My central thesis is that banning is not the appropriate mechanism
>> for markup that works interoperably and is widely and willfully
>> used.  You are free to campaign against cheeseburgers, but are not
>> free to outright ban their sale.
>
> HTML 5 intends to make all markup interoperable. One can argue that
> every markup is willfully used. Following that path,
> validators/conformance checkers are completely unnecessary. HTML 5
> validator could respond to every document with "Congratulations! Your
> document is... meh, whatever!" Once HTML 4 browsers disappear, there
> will be no practical difference between conforming and non-conforming
> documents.

I believe that we can agree that http://www.craigslist.com/ is 
non-conforming:

http://html5.validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.craigslist.com%2F
http://intertwingly.net/stories/2010/03/21/www.craigslist.com
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.craigslist.com%2F

In particular, the incorrect encoding declaration and stray <p> tag are 
items we can agree are non-conforming.

> I think bar for conformance should be much higher, and take good
> practices (accessibility, usability, maintainability) into account.
> Those authors who don't care about such criteria can continue to
> ignore them, their markup will be interoperable anyway.
>
> It's easy to find exceptions where "banned" elements are harmless,
> but this shouldn't be excuse to allow all uses of them, including
> those which are harmful.

No one is suggesting that we allow markup that is harmful.

> I want to campaign for markup I consider of good quality, and I would
> prefer if that would be the same as conforming HTML 5. HTML 5 spec
> and conformance checkers will have a lot of authority, and it will be
> very difficult to campaign against them (i.e. it's difficult to
> convince people that markup which validates is not good).

I agree that http://www.craigslist.com/ could be improved by the 
increased use of CSS.  But I will assert that that is a willful choice 
that the authors of that site have made.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Sunday, 28 March 2010 14:34:44 UTC