Re: HTML5 design philosophy disconnect

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
>>- the implementation status note for WebKit explains that WebKit trunk
>>does not pass all the relevant test cases.
>
> this is of little use to a developer as there is no indication of what
> it does pass and what it does not and what the relevant test cases
> are, and in fact all the browsers have the same note.

I absolutely agree that linking through to precise test results would
be an improvement, but will probably take some time to set up. At the
moment, I believe we're a bit short of tests… so we're perhaps putting
the cart before the horse! Still, see the various archives for some
discussions about how the specs could rise to something more like
caniuse.com's levels of usability here.

> I would be surprised if the accessibility API mappings are considered
> relevant test cases for HTML5 as these are for the most part not
> specified in HTML5.

Well, quite. The API mappings should have their own test suites and
implementation notes. Is anyone working on submitting tests for the
API mappings?

> The approach I have taken in the alt spec is to provide information to
> developers about the advantages and disadvantages of various features,
> for example:
> http://dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/#altmethod

What's the long term plan here? Will you keep changing this as
implementations change once W3C finally snapshots HTML5? How will
developers get advice that reflects recent implementation changes once
that spec is finalised?

Perhaps it would be valuable to have an authoring guide that takes
into account both HTML and related specs (UAAG, API mapping, CSS, DOM,
etc) and implementation status, but that's not the HTML specification
itself.

http://www.w3.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Curriculum is a tutorial along these lines.

It would be good if there was also a feature reference comparable to
Sitepoint/Google Doctype etc.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Friday, 6 January 2012 14:56:44 UTC