Re: Removing XHTML saving from ReSpec?

On 25/02/2013 18:08 , Shane McCarron wrote:
> There are elements in HTML5 that are not present in earlier versions
> of HTML.  To the extent those elements have semantics non-modern user
> agents will not be able to faithfully reproduce those semantics.  The
> section element is a perfect example.  IE6 will not know what to do
> with a section element.  Screen readers will not know what to do with
> it.  Textual document processors such as the Perl module HTML::Tree
> will also fail to properly interpret the element.  Over time these
> sorts of things will hopefully become less important, but today they
> remain issues.

I'm aware of that, but I don't know of widespread real-world cases in 
which these get in the way. For older IEs we use HTML5 Shiv (as blessed 
by W3C in a previous thread). For AT my understanding is that older AT 
doesn't care about unknown elements (i.e. treats them as meaningless) 
whereas for newer versions it's better to use the semantic elements 
since they map to well-known ARIA interpretations (in other words, at 
worst it makes no difference, in the common case it's a win).

As for people using really old libraries to process stuff in TR, well... 
at some point we can't really take that into account. And that point has 
passed: we've been releasing HTML5 specs for a year now!

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Monday, 25 February 2013 17:14:17 UTC