Re: Comments on XHTML 2.0 Working Draft

06.08.02 21:06:50, Alexander Savenkov <w3@hotbox.ru> wrote:

>Hello Chris, everyone,
>
>> XHTML 2.0 Working Draft Comments
>> ================================
>Brilliant comments!
>
>I make bold to add some more remarks:
>
>8.1. The abbr element and 8.2. The acronym element
>---------------------     ------------------------
>Can someone explain me why there are still two elements for the same
>purpose? As Steven Pemberton once mentioned 'There is a long dull
>discussion on what is an acronym and what not'. Was there one?

I agree. The lingustics aside, the acronym/abbr element is interesting for 
two reasons, the longhand (slightly hackish in the title attribute) and 
whether it should be spelled out in an aural context (a style issue).


>8.5. The br element
>-------------------
>I agree with Jonas here. What's the purpose of having a deprecated
>element in a document explicitly marked as backwards-incompatible?

The goal for XHTML 2.0 is not to be backwards incompatible, but backwards 
compatibility is is much less important than it was for XHTML 1.0, and 
should not be used as an excuse not to remove/fix misfeatures just because 
they have been there before. General backwards compatibility is still 
necessary, otherwise XHTML 2.0 would not be XHTML, but some other language.

There is nothing wrong with the deprecation mechanism, slating something for 
later removal. Though where we could do so with no harm, features have been 
removed outright. In the case of the list start and value attributes, 
deprecated features are back in.
 
Who is to say that more features will not be deprecated as the working draft 
progresses? Good examples here could be hr or strong.


>17.1. The hr element
>--------------------
>While it's clearly explained why the 'sub' and 'sup' elements are left
>in the spec, no reason provided for the 'hr' element. I doubt there
>are languages using horizontal rule, and since HTML 2.0 [3] I haven't seen
>any intelligible explanations. I kindly ask you to provide
>reasoning for keeping 'hr'.

hr is having a precarious existence right now. I suspect a "Save the hr!" or 
"Kill the hr!" campaign could have an impact (send your campaign funds 
to...). Is it purely decorational, does it have some semantic meaning as a 
separator element, or is it simply too convenient or entrenched to remove? 

Personally I haven't used it in years, and I don't miss it (and I certainly 
don't miss stripping out <HR>s out of old documents).

>G. Acknowledgements
>-------------------
>'This section will be updated at publication time.'
>Sounds promising. No doubt you should have dedicated more time to the
>XHTML 2.0 draft. But that's just my opinion.

This is the first draft, and it won't be the last. That section will be 
updated at some publication time, and so will many or most of the others.


Jonny Axelsson,
Documentation,
Opera Software

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 03:55:22 UTC