- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 12:23:29 +0000 (UTC)
- To: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, David Woolley wrote: >> >> -- if the feature is not interoperable, then authors aren't referring to >> the spec anyway (at least not successfully) so there is no point the spec >> existing for those features. > > The problem with this example is that any designer who refuses to > implement a client's request for popout menus and "cool" animations > simply because the CSS2.1 specification doesn't include positioning > will be laughed out of court. They will just return to their copy > of "Blue Chip Web Site Authoring for Trained Monkey's", or plagiarising > code that does do it, even if it has horrible, browser sniffing, > hacks. How does this differ from what they would do in the case where the spec says one thing, but UAs all do something else? Which is the case we're talking about here. > I might think that a lot of this sort of animation is bad for users, > but that is not the perception of the people with the money to pay > for sites, so any W3C specification that doesn't acknowledge it will > be treated as an irrelevance. Any W3C specification that "acknowledges" a feature by describing it in a way completely different to the real world will also be treated as an irrelevance. I don't see why you would prefer the spec to be wrong (effectively, to lie) than to simply not mention the features which are not interoperably implemented. There are other features that _are_ interoperably implemented (to some degree) such as <marquee> -- should the HTML4 spec be errataed to include a description of this tag just because otherwise people will think of ithe spec as irrelevant? -- Ian Hickson )\._.,--....,'``. fL U+1047E /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2004 07:23:46 UTC