Re: Note in HTML4 spec about html5?

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 3:38 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
> Quoting Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>:
>
>>
>> More importantly, the HTML5 work is what is relevant to implementors.
>>
>
> While this may very well be the case, implementors are not the only
> audience/consumers of HTML, or of the HTML4 and XHTML1 Recommendations.
>
> Not every web developer/author gets to implement the latest and greatest
> that HTML5 purports to offer: often they are held back by corporate policy
> (etc.) and are restricted to using only HTML4 and/or XHTML1 (which are
> finalized Recommendations). Often times these corporate restrictions are
> "enforced" by legal mandates (etc.), misguided as that may seem to some.
>
> Not every web project is the next
> twitter/facebook/instagram/mailchimp/Oooh-shiny-new-distracting-and-edgy
> project.
>
> They call them Standards for a reason.

Sorry for being unclear, by "implementors" I meant to include web
developers/authors as people, not exclude them.

Including a link to the latest work on XHTML did not interfere with
people trying to meet arbitrary external requirements in 1999, and
including a link to the latest work on HTML will not interfere with
them in 2012. It will help such people produce documents/software that
interoperable with other documents/software if they take notice of the
latest work as well as the spec to which they are required to conform.

Web developers are have to conform to HTML4/XHTML1 are not uncommon.
Web developers who can simply markup according to HTML4/XHTML2
ignoring the reality of what got implemented in the subsequent dozen
years are very rare. Web developers who use JS but restrict themselves
to DOM APIs as standardized circa 1999 are rarer still. Even they may
be interested in the technological developments of the subsequent
decade.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Wednesday, 14 March 2012 20:23:23 UTC