Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] <search> HTML element (Issue #714)

### What's wrong with this proposal?

1. The intent was to make specification and implementation easy, not the developer experience good.
2. The proposal ignores [developers' requests]( https://kaleidea.github.io/whatwg-search-proposal/#requests-for-this-feature ) (which came later, to be fair).
3. It ignores the best practice and [contradicts common sense]( https://kaleidea.github.io/whatwg-search-proposal/#motivation ), causing a steeper learning curve and more mistakes: a worse developer experience.
4. It focuses on JS-dependent solutions (client-side rendering). Use-cases of MPA, no-JS (a11y on slow networks) were just after-thought. As the current trend is to move back from SPAs to MPAs, these use-cases become more important once again.



There is an even more concerning pattern underlying the issue:

#### Imperative bias in HTML standardization

HTML was created as a declarative language. JS was meant to be an enhancement to add affordances, polish and complex features.
Yet, what we consider fundamental features today (eg. components, dialog) aren't designed to be effectively usable in a declarative fashion. These features are designed from the start with JS dependence.

This has caused developer dissatisfaction on a large scale, for a long time. [4 years ago]( https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/510#issue-257200716 ): "One of the promises of early Shadow DOM ... was that while we would build the first version as an imperative (JS-based) API ..., **we'd come in later and backfill a declarative version that made it very easy to use for common cases.**" The [only such effort]( https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5465 ) is now championed by a non-WHATWG member.

The WHATWG, while contributing immense value to the web platform, seems to be distant from HTML's core tenets.
More problematically, the community's input to bring it back was largely ineffective, often because WHATWG members did not show interest, like in the case of the `<search>` element. In my opinion.


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Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2022 08:47:53 UTC