Re: HTML 5 (sic) and A11y

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:16:02 +0100, Steve Faulkner  
<faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think authoring conformance requrements are not served well by the  
> living standard  model, there is no certainty over the  rules that  
> authors should follow.
> also including things that are half-baked (hgroup springs to mind) in a
> standard can potentially mislead developers,  waste time thier time and
> undermine the concept of web (authoring) standards.
>
> While the commit then review on an unversioned docuemnt may be a useful
> method for the development of new features it does not follow that it is  
> a good method for the authoring practices that accompany features.
> While the brower vendors may control what is implemented , they do not  
> and should not control the authoring conformance requirements associated  
> with
> imlementations.

How do you tell what is half-baked and what is ready though? <canvas> is  
maybe not ready, but people are using it. Should they have waited  
five-to-ten years until we figured it out more? What about XMLHttpRequest?

How do you tell something is ready for authors? Was <style> ready for  
authors when HTML4 shipped? Per HTML4 its media="" attribute defaults to  
"screen", an ugly bug and never fixed. Is that better than being able to  
quickly fix such mistakes?

Would we have known <hgroup> might not be the best approach if we had not  
exposed it to the web?


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Monday, 24 January 2011 13:29:11 UTC