- From: Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:31:37 +0000
- To: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- CC: Dustin Boyd <rpgfan3233@gmail.com>, www-html@w3.org, Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@webbackplane.com>, Brett Patterson <inspiron.pattersonb@gmail.com>, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>, Molte <molte93@gmail.com>, Shavkat Karimov <shavkat@seomanager.com>
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> Consider the XML:
>
> <img src="cat.jpg">A black cat playing with a ball of string</img>
>
> If a browser implements the HTML5 spec, then that must be treated as an
> image with missing alternative text. So a visual browser might either
> display the cat photo or a missing image icon, while a screen reader
> might ignore the image, read "image", or attempt to reconstruct
> alternative text from the src attribute ("cat").
>
> If a browser implements the XHTML2 spec, then that must be treated as a
> cat photo with the alternative text "A black cat playing with a ball of
> string".
>
> Again, consider the XML::
>
> <span href="http://www.w3.com">W3.com</span>
>
> If a browser implements the HTML5 spec, that is just some text in a
> SPAN. If a browser implements the XHTML2 spec, that is a hyperlink.
>
> Since popular browsers seem more interested in implementing HTML5 than
> XHTML2,
which is a great shame, because the XML semantics appear (to the
current author) to be both far more intuitive and far more useful
than those of HTML5.
> this seems like a guarantee that they won't implement XHTML2, at
> least not as a whole, unless the specs converge on such points.
Then let us hope that the benefits of the XML semantics are (or
become) obvious to all.
Philip TAYLOR
Received on Friday, 9 January 2009 13:32:29 UTC