Re: kelvSYC's Thoughts on the new XHTML Draft

On Friday, May 9, 2003, at 14:02 Europe/Helsinki, Tantek Çelik wrote:

>> h1 to h6 Elements:
>> Drop them.  The section/h combo has every advantage in terms of
>> semantics over them.
>
> I agree with deprecating them, but disagree with dropping them.
> They have been tried and true elements that both work and are mostly
> harmless.  I would be in favor of deprecating h1...h6, but certainly 
> not
> removing them.

I think it is a bad idea to introduce elements into a new namespace as 
deprecated. What's the point in introducing something that is marked as 
"should not be used" right away?

Including the h1...h6 elements would add complexity to software that 
needs to deal with XHTML 2 documents. Consider displaying a meaningful 
outline of a document that mixes h and h1...h6 for example.

I see two reasons for including h1...h6 and neither reason is good 
enough for including those elements, IMO:

1. Authors who are accustomed to h1...h6 don't want to learn new habits.

    I don't think it makes sense to introduce cruft in order to allow 
authors who
    don't want to learn new things to appear as if they were 
buzzword-compliant.
    If they want to look cutting-edge, there's nothing wrong in 
requiring them to
    learn something new.

2. Make it easier to convert HTML or XHTML 1 to XHTML 2.

    What's the point in reducing the complexity of a converter to the 
point of
    not actually doing a conversion when the cost is increasing the 
complexity
    of the XHTML 2 UAs?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/

Received on Saturday, 10 May 2003 13:42:35 UTC