Re: Cleaning House

On Wed, 2 May 2007, Elliott Sprehn wrote:

> On May 2, 2007, at 12:58 PM, Lee Roberts wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> 
>> 1.  How long do we need to continue to support deprecated tags? 
>> HTML4 attempted to clean house by deprecating tags in lieu of CSS 
>> abilities.
>
> Forever. The specification must contain details on how to process 
> the deprecated tags so that UAs of the future will know how to 
> process old documents.

I agree with documenting deprecated tags for future UAs but don't 
see that that necessarily means this has to be done in the same 
specification. It would be a lot cleaner to have one specification 
for just the current tags and separate specifications for 
deprecated/obsolete tags.

>> 4.  Can't we start by cleaning up the HTML4.x and XHTML1.x 
>> standards? After we clean that up, I think we could then discuss 
>> new elements such as term, canvas, and others.
>
> Is there a problem with accepting the WHATWG HTML5 specification 
> as a starting point? A lot of this work was already done.

It would indeed be a shame to throw that work away, but that is not 
in itself a reason for having one giant spec that covers all current 
and past features, worts and all.

It would be a lot more manageable if we were to proceed with several 
smaller specs. This would be easier on people from outside of the 
HTML WG, and easier when it comes to moving through the various 
stages of the W3C Process.

Note that I am in favor of reviewing the HTML5 spec as it currently 
stands, but think we move forward with several smaller more 
manageable specs based upon the original materials, the reviewers 
comments, and any new ideas that happen along the way.

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2007 18:06:55 UTC