review of hgroup element prior to last call.

Dear chairs,
I want to raise the issue of hgroup.

The element's inclusion in the HTML5 spec as is,  I believe is not widely
supported by HTML5 advocates and those involved in the HTML5 standard
development.

It is currently the subject of 3  bug reports, 2 of which call for its
removal hgroup, the other calls for a major change via the addition of a new
element to HTML5.

lars gunther provided a good overview of the issue in his recent post to the
HTML list http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Jan/0256.html

understanding that we have the html wg process marching on, I wanted to know
if there was any room to consider dealing with hgroup prior to last call?

I believe that if the W3C html working group were to review hgroup prior to
last call there is a very good probability that hgroup will be substantially
modified or removed from HTML5 altogether. If this is a likely outcome then
it would be best for all involved in web development that this occurred
sooner rather than later, rather than people wasting their time using the
element. we currently have an opportunity to modify or remove the element
while it has no real implementation or authoring impact, we may not be able
to say that down the track a while.

Is there an opportunity for the feeling of the working group to gauged on an
issue such as this? via an informal poll for example.

thanks for your consideration

-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG

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