Re: more xhtml 2.0 comments

> 6. stylesheets can't be scoped on a per-element basis

This would shift the balance of control of styling away from the users,
as only the authors would have access to this mechanism.

> 17. I don't understand why access-key is in XHTML2. In the XHTML2 spirit as

I imagine that the reason is Accessibility, although I might agree that
access-key has proved largely unworkable, except within an organisation,
where the choice of browser is known and users regularly use the
application - and the fact that I use application rather than document,
does conflict with the philosophy of XHTML.

A counter proposal to add it as a style attribute is probably needed, 
but, to the extent that there is an Accssibility benefit, this would
force several tools that now do not understand style sheets to have
to understand them in part.

> 36. section 15.2.4 is just a denial of the progressive rendering... Does the
>     HTML WG really think that browsers are not going to start rendering very

A confession:  I'm responding based on the comments rather than the original
document (I'm not paid to influence the design of XHTML), and I don't
know what section 15.2.4 is, however...

I personally think that incremental rendering is a very desirable attribut,
but it is clear that commercial web designers do not, given the heavy
use of layout tables and the almost total ignorance of table-layout: fixed,
meaning that many, if not most, commercial sites do not render incrementally.

Also, quite a few recent proposals, that seem to have been taken seriously,
on www-style, either inhibit incremental rendering or require backtracking
in the renderer.

> 41. I still think that the removal of B, I and U is a major error for the Web.
>     One may want to annotate visually a document without adding any semantic.

Gratuitous presentational attributes should be done with style sheets - 
although again lots of people just define new presentational elements
using class=red, etc., in real world HTML.

Lack of comment is not necessarily agreement; in some cases the counter
arguments have been put so many times as to not be worth repeating; in
other cases, I don't feel I know enough about the specification to 
comment.

Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2003 02:25:51 UTC