W3C

Results of Questionnaire ISSUE-89: Remove Section 4.13 Common Idioms without dedicated Elements - Straw Poll for Objections

The results of this questionnaire are available to anybody.

This questionnaire was open from 2010-10-05 to 2010-10-13.

5 answers have been received.

Jump to results for question:

  1. Objections to the Change Proposal to Remove the Idioms Section
  2. Objections to the Change Proposal to Retain the Idioms Section

1. Objections to the Change Proposal to Remove the Idioms Section

We have a Change Proposal to Remove the Idioms Section. If you have strong objections to adopting this Change Proposal, please state your objections below.

Keep in mind, you must actually state an objection, not merely cite someone else. If you feel that your objection has already been adequately addressed by someone else, then it is not necessary to repeat it.

Details

Responder Objections to the Change Proposal to Remove the Idioms Section
Jonas Sicking I object to this proposal as it removes information that authors could find useful. In particular how to mark up footnotes and how to mark up main contents of a page is something that I've seen repeatedly asked on the public-html mailing list and elsewhere. So it seems like a good idea to help educate authors on how to do this in a manner that is semantic and accessibility friendly.

I continue to see a lot of web authoring being done through copy'n'paste. In fact, I've done so myself at times when I've had to throw something together quickly and there has been documents available from sources that I trust. This copy'n'paste process tend to spread content and patterns across the web. I think it would be beneficial if we can seed such spread with well authored contents.

I do agree that the current set of idioms are fairly random and I suspect there are many more idioms that could benefit from being documented.

However I would also be fine with moving the idioms section to a separate document. I don't see a particular strong reason for it to be in the specification itself. This would be especially useful if the set of idioms grow. However if this happens I would prefer to see such a document being published by the HTML WG as to lend it trust.

But since no change proposal was put forward to put the idioms in a separate specification, and since previous similar efforts to break out sections into separate spec was met with a lot of red tape and objections once those separate specs were published (in particular this happened with the microdata spec), I object to removing this useful information at this time.

We can always break it out into a separate document if new information arises, such as a new draft.
Julian Reschke
John Foliot
Philip Jägenstedt Several of the idioms are quite useful. The first, "The main part of the content", is something that anyone who's added <header> and <footer> elements will naturally come to think about. "Conversations" is also useful, especially since there once was dedicated markup suggested for this. "Footnotes" is something I've personally wondered about, and the guidance is helpful, if nothing else to show that there *isn't* a single correct way to do footnotes. I object to removing useful spec text speculatively.

If there is serious risk that people will take these sections to be normative, then perhaps we should just add a big note stating that it is not.
Aryeh Gregor The purpose of HTML is to allow authors to mark up content in a way that can be handled uniformly by machines. It supplies a variety of elements with different meanings, and tells authors how they're expected to be used. It would make absolutely no sense to suggest that the HTML spec should not, for instance, tell authors that paragraphs should be marked up with <p> -- the element would be meaningless to readers of the spec (quite literally) if this semantic information were not included.

More broadly, then, one purpose of an HTML specification is to instruct authors on what elements they're expected to use in particular circumstances. This instruction is inextricable from the purpose of HTML as a semantic authoring language -- if authors don't at least attempt to use the same markup to mean the same thing, then for practical purposes, the language has no semantics at all.

All of this applies to semantics that don't have dedicated elements, every bit as much as those that do. There is no reason I can see why the spec should say what markup should be used for paragraphs, but not for dialogs. Any rationale for one applies about as well to the other. The statement "No interoperability or other problem is introduced if people use different markup" in this change proposal is arguably correct, but in that case, we should remove *all* semantics from the spec -- just let people use <p> and <article> and so on as divs with different names and default styling. Let people use the elements organically, developing best practices over time, etc. The entire rationale applies verbatim to removing all element semantics from the spec.

So I object to this proposal because it gives no reason for singling out idioms that have no dedicated elements, while leaving all the semantics for individual elements. This amounts to giving authors instructions for what elements to use only for an arbitrary subset of the content types they would want to mark up.

2. Objections to the Change Proposal to Retain the Idioms Section

We have a Change Proposal to Retain the Idioms Section. If you have strong objections to adopting this Change Proposal, please state your objections below.

Keep in mind, you must actually state an objection, not merely cite someone else. If you feel that your objection has already been adequately addressed by someone else, then it is not necessary to repeat it.

Details

Responder Objections to the Change Proposal to Retain the Idioms Section
Jonas Sicking
Julian Reschke I believe that helping authors finding good markup for things that do not have matching HTML elements is good. I do *not* think it belongs into the HTML spec. As Jonas said, a separate document may make sense.

I propose that we revisit this question at a later point, for instance, when the list of suggested idioms grows.
John Foliot I am opposed to this proposal on the grounds that it attempts to invoke accessibility as a justification for retention:

"This has the potential to reduce author confusion for very little cost, and helps to ensure that complex content is marked up in a way that is widely usable, such as for accessibility purposes."

Given that much of the author guidance supplied by the editor to date w.r.t. accessibility has come under scrutiny and disagreement by many within the Accessibility Task Force (to the point that there is at least one Change Proposal to replace some of that guidance: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/altspecification) I believe that it is inappropriate to have this type of guidance in the specification at this time. Author guidance (regarding accessibility) is clearly chartered as the responsibility of PFWG and the WCAG-WG

I echo Julian Reschke's sentiment that this should probably be a stand-alone document, and that it should be revisited once the specification has become stable(CR). The work on that document should also include members of PFWG/the Accessibility Task Force to ensure that any author guidance *does* have consensus in meeting accessibility requirements. I believe it is within the scope of the Chairs to make that request.
Philip Jägenstedt
Aryeh Gregor

More details on responses

  • Jonas Sicking: last responded on 5, October 2010 at 08:46 (UTC)
  • Julian Reschke: last responded on 5, October 2010 at 12:07 (UTC)
  • John Foliot: last responded on 5, October 2010 at 17:17 (UTC)
  • Philip Jägenstedt: last responded on 6, October 2010 at 05:20 (UTC)
  • Aryeh Gregor: last responded on 7, October 2010 at 23:36 (UTC)

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