Richard Ishida's comments on XHTML2 WD

It seems to me that XHTML 2 could perform a very useful role in establishing a base set of tags for people who want to develop their own more specialised vocabulary. It takes care of things like tables, linking strategies, bidi requirements, accessibility concerns, etc, etc. and allows the schema developer to concentrate on unique aspects of their vocabulary. It seems that this would be a strong selling point for XHTML2 and worth adding a clear mention to the abstract or at least the introduction.

"lets you explicit markup the"

Some browsers display the title attribute as a tooltip. Suggest change to 'alt or title attributes'. (See also I18N Core WG comments about title attribute.)

Note that, depending on your editing environment, ins and del can be much easier to apply and delete for inline text than an attribute. This is the case, for example, in the graphical tags-on view such as you have in XMetal, where the elements can be inserted and removed very simply. I will be sorry to see ins and del go. Is there a chance we could have them and attributes for inline markup - author to choose which they prefer?

Would it make sense to require a DOCTYPE?

"After the document type declaration" - there may also be an XML declaration or PI, such as stylesheet, not just DOCTYPE

I was surprised that there wasn't more advice about the use of blockquote, and expected presentational behaviour, particularly wrt quote marks.

Why are there two styles of headings allowed. Doesn't the continued presence of h1 etc allow for continued misuse of headings? It's not clear to me what is the benefit of having these elements around.

I also find the usage in the example in 8.5 somewhat dubious, and counter to the aim of clarity in structure. I think that each section should have at most one heading, and the boundaries of the text described by that heading should be clear. Otherwise, it becomes more difficult to do things like programmatically extract a section and its heading using scripting in XSLT.

It would be helpful, for content authors, to point to or include some information about why the content model for p has changed in this way, and what the implications are.

Sidenote: The localization community will need to recognize that a p element is no longer necessarily a good candidate for a translation unit, to support source matching. Context is all important.

It would be good to see a brief discussion on the relative merits of the separator element and the use of divs with border styling.

Note that editor's notes are difficult to spot, or at least the end is difficult to spot, if people print the specification without background colors. Some indentation or border styling might improve readability.

extra " just before Gandalf

There is no punctuation at the end of the cite example.

"The strong element indicates higher importance for its contents." Higher than what?

I think the example would read better in English as "Please put the rubbish out on <em>Monday</em>, but <strong>not</strong> before nightfall!"

Does it not introduce inconsistent semantics to a document to allow the use of <a> in addition to other methods of linking? I'm not clear why it was retained?

I think that at least you could change "but has been retained to allow the expression of explicit links" to" but has been retained to allow an alternative expression of explicit links".

I'd like to have seen the definition of 'geek' rather than 'hacker', given that for 'dweeb'.

In the example, unneeded space after "Contents".

The 'shortcuts' title isn't correctly presented.

It says "Please consult the section on character encodings for more details.", but I wasn't sure which section that was referring to.

Where is the perl script?

Suggested rewording: "When set for the table element" --> "When set for or inherited by the table element".