Re: [webcomponents] Custom Elements Spec

On Tue, 08 May 2012 07:00:41 +0200, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Mon, 7 May 2012, Dimitri Glazkov wrote:
>>
>> If you look at the two alternatives, one (the "is" attribute) asks the
>> authors to make the right choice. The other asks the component
>> developers to make the right choice. In the former case, the pool of
>> people who need to do the right thing is several orders of magnitude
>> larger than the latter. From there, it takes pure statistics to figure
>> out which alternative is likely to get better results.
>
> I don't think those two sets of people are different in any meaningful
> way.

Perhaps not in the field of people who write their own websites by hand,  
but I think in the general case they will clearly differ.

> Sure, there will be some more advanced authors who write some
> higher-profile components, but honestly I would expect the number of
> people who write components to be roughly on par with the number of  
> people writing CSS style sheets.

Which reinforces the argument. While I write my own CSS for content I  
produce for my own use, most of the content published by Opera is done  
with a stylesheet produced by one of a very few people. This is even more  
the case for large organisations, social networking and news sites,  
Wikipedia and educational material and so on.

> After all, people are going to want to write
> components whenever they want to make form controls fit their site,
> whenever they have the slightest need for a customised widget or other,

In most corporate environments, it doesn't work like that. In many  
organisations that have some commitment to accessibility (even the ones  
who don't get i) there is a clear policy of having a few "experts"  
(increasingly they actually are) create a set of widgets - analagous to  
the jquery experience Tab mentioned.

> etc. If we do this right, this will just be viewed as an extension to CSS
> and HTML that everyone can use.

Sure. But vast swathes of HTML are not written by people from scratch, but  
relying on scripts, style snippets or style sheets, and templates which  
someone wrote for them - both to make life easier and as part of  
quality-controlled workflows.

There will certainly be people who don't care about accessibility and  
don't do anything at all (just as there are for simple things like alt  
attributes), and others who care but get it wrong, but aligning with the  
common model for those who care and are trying to get it right strikes me  
as a big benefit.

cheers

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan noen norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2012 07:49:46 UTC