Re: kelvSYC's Thoughts on the new XHTML Draft

On Sunday, May 11, 2003, at 00:43 Europe/Helsinki, Tantek Çelik wrote:

> On 5/10/03 1:42 PM, "Henri Sivonen" <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, May 10, 2003, at 22:40 Europe/Helsinki, Tantek Çelik 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 5/10/03 7:49 AM, "Henri Sivonen" <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>> h1 to h6 Elements:

>> The elements and attributes that were deprecated in HTML 4 exist in 
>> the
>> XHTML 1 namespace because they were labeled "Transitional".
>
> Yes, and this greatly aided the adoption/success of HTML4.

But was it good to carry the deprecated stuff over to XHTML?

> You are missing a step.
>
> H1...H6 were are NOT deprecated yet.
>
> This (deprecating them in XHTML2) is the first step.

Since even optimistically it takes at least six years for a W3C spec to 
become supported enough to be used casually by Web authors, I think it 
is safe to remove stuff and let the six years be warning enough (as 
opposed to first deprecating for six years and then taking another six 
years for removal).

>>> And more importantly, even if it *did* introduce complexity in the
>>> software,
>>> such complexity is *strongly* preferable to complexity in what web
>>> authors/developers have to deal with.
>>
>> Don't two different heading schemes constitute complexity for the
>> authors?
>
> Yes.  Hence my suggestion to place them in a separate module.  Then 
> that
> module as a whole can be deprecated.

Why not leave the deprecated stuff in the XHTML 1 namespace?

>> Given two heading schemes two HTML 2 documents
>
> I'm sure you meant _X_HTML 2 documents rather than HTML 2.0 documents.

Yes. That was a typo.

> But the way you put it "a number of other familiar elements in XHTML 2"
> makes me think that you would prefer this approach as I mentioned in my
> message:
>
>   "create a brand new super cleaned up and purified language that 
> simply
> borrows a few things here and there from HTML"

Yes, I would prefer allowing significant clean-up even if it makes the 
language less familiar.

For example, the structures available in HTML describe usual story 
content but practically have to my more or less misused to describe 
site "chrome" like navigation etc. I think it would be good to address 
that even if it means a departure from HTML.

> In that case, rather than trying to twist XHTML2 into this other 
> entity, why
> not go all the way and simply propose such a new language (just don't 
> call
> it HTML)?

Marketing leverage, brand recognition. :-)

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

Received on Wednesday, 14 May 2003 14:35:21 UTC