Review of ISSUE-164 change proposals - Part 1: Replace hgroup with the subline element

We have five change proposals for ISSUE-164:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/status/issue-status.html#ISSUE-164

The following is a Chairs review of the following change proposal:

Replace hgroup with the subline element
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/hgroup

1. Structure of change proposal

The proposal includes an appropriate Summary, Rationale, Proposed Details and Impact.

2. General comments on change proposal

a) Rationale

  *   real world examples<http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Hgroup_element> gathered on the whatwg wiki do not reflect a compelling pattern or need for hgroup, but they do reflect the usefulness of an element that can be used as an indication that its content is a subheading, subtitle, tagline and byline. This can be shown by examples of subline use<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/Hgroup> with the real world use cases provided.
Your assertion "do not reflect a compelling pattern or need for hgroup" needs to be better instantiated.  Some of this proof may be in your examples of subline use<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/Hgroup> but your argument would be stronger if you included this material directly in your change proposal.

>The hgroup element has not been generally well received by authors:
>Or by people involved in HTML5 specification development:

You are making your rationale by reference here without outlining any of the arguments made by the referenced people or documents.  Your position would be much stronger if you summarized the major arguments made in each of your references directly in your Change Proposal.

*  Or by implementors: in terms of its semantics and effect on the outline algorithm
                           o  zero implementations

This statement conflicts directly with the statement in the zero change proposal: "<hgroup> support has been shipped in multiple browsers".  See the Rationale in:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Nov/0031.html   Your change proposal would be stronger if you could provide concrete evidence to refute the position in the other change proposal.

b) Details

>Remove the hgroup element from HTML5
>Add the subline<http://www.html5accessibility.com/tests/subline.html> element to HTML5

These Details are possibly inadequate.  If the first instruction is referring to just Section 4.4.7 The hgroup element<http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/single-page.html#the-hgroup-element> then it omits the other mentions to hgroup in the HTML5 specification.  In addition the second instruction to add the proposed subline<http://www.html5accessibility.com/tests/subline.html> element omits any indication if subline should be added to any other sections in the document to replace the hgroup occurrences.

Please let the Chairs know by Tue Jul 31 if you plan to revise your change proposal and when you can do the revision by.

/paulc
HTML WG co-chair

Paul Cotton, Microsoft Canada
17 Eleanor Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6A3
Tel: (425) 705-9596 Fax: (425) 936-7329