Re: HTML5 Authoring Conformance Study

On 03/21/2010 03:20 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>
> I've decided that it's worthwhile to review the HTML5 conformance errors
> reported on notable sites in more details. I started the following wiki
> page to collect data:
>
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/HTML5_Authoring_Conformance_Study
>
> Thanks to Aryeh Gregor and myself, we now have a full classification of
> HTML5 conformance errors on the Alexa Top 10. Thanks also to Sam Ruby
> for his blog post that inspired the set of sites chosen and links to
> similar data in raw form. If anyone would like to help with gathering
> the data for the remaining sites, it would be much appreciated. The
> methodology is documented on the wiki page.

"full"?  Not hardly.  <grin>

I still remain deeply concerned about a "Ready?  Fire!  Aim?" approach 
to solving these problems.  The first thing that needs to be done is to 
decide on what problems does Authhor Conformance Requirements address, 
and how does the having them makes things better?  In short, we would be 
best served by requiring a change proposal for such things.

Meanwhile, I've selected one issue each from the top ten list to explore 
further here.

google.com:

the script tag is not unclosed, the html and body tags are unclosed. 
HTML5 has many elements which do not require close tags.  It even has 
many tags that are entirely optional.  Both of these tags are entirely 
optional, but apparently if present must be explicitly closed.  What 
operational interop problem does this solve?

facebook.com:

How is this a "bad doctype"?  What operational interop problem does it 
solve to identify this doctype as non-conforming?  I thought the HTML5 
strategy was that the web is to be considered as non-versioned.

yahoo.com:

y-pkgid could arguably conform to "proposal Y" for issue-41.  Allowing 
"modid" would both inhibit the ability of the validator to catch 
misspellings, and the ability for future versions of the spec to define 
new attributes.

youtube.com:

What interop issues are solved by disallowing div elements inside of 
span elements?

live.com:

This issue has already been widely discussed.  Additional information 
can be found here: http://philip.html5.org/data/xmlns-bindings.txt

wikipedia.org:

While there are no errors, there is a warning, and getting the 
definition of IRI correct is definitely something that is relevant to HTML5.

blogger.com:

What interop issues are solved by disallowing blank targets?

baidu.com:

What interop issues are solved by requiring script elements to come 
before </body>?

msn.com:

Separate issues: whitespaces within query and whitespace either before 
or after the IRI.

qq.com:

I realize that X-UA-compatible is controversial, but non-conforming?

- Sam Ruby

Received on Sunday, 21 March 2010 12:23:09 UTC