Re: Deprecated or not?

Bertilo Wennergren wrote:
[...]
> I guess one could interpret "support for deprecated elements" as "support for
> SOME deprecated elements". I however read it as "support for ALL deprecated
> elements", as I suppose most people would. <applet> seems to be the one big
> exception, so it would seem appropriate to mention that somewhere.
> 
> To make things clear: I have nothing against the applet element. I just
> want to understand the goings on.

Well, I apologize that we haven't covered all the bases in our specs. 
There's a lot of material and we've tried to keep them smaller rather
than larger. I must admit I didn't think people would expect so much
by way of reasons *why* in a specification. It's not that common.

But you've got the gist of it. We *would* have removed <applet> except 
that <object>'s support of Java applets is still pretty spotty. I think 
even the folks at Java Software would like to see <object> succeed as 
<applet>'s successor, but it hasn't happened yet. So it remains.

I think people make too big a deal on whether something is deprecated or
not. There's no formal definition of what deprecated really means in 
terms of EOL'ing features. There's plenty of opinion, and I'd like as
much as anyone for all the major browsers to have 100% compliant products,
but apparently the complexity of HTML, CSS, etc. have gotten to the 
point where only the very largest players can afford to keep up. A sad 
statement, but true.

Every year a word seems to come up in my life that serves somewhat as a
theme. This year my word is 'simplification'. Everything I see needs some
pretty heavy simplification. The most successful specs are usually the
simplest, if that's a clue to *anybody* listening in say, the XML Schema
WG. It's one of the reasons why <object> never worked: 36 attributes.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                            <mailto:altheim&#x40;eng.sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025

   the honey bee is sad and cross and wicked as a weasel 
   and when she perches on you boss she leaves a little measle -- archy

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2000 13:40:00 UTC