Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>> It is a fact that obsolete features are in wide use today by content
>> served as text/html.  Therefore, any HTML specification(s) normatively
>> referenced by the media type registration needs to define what that
>> content means.
>
> It needs to define how the content should be handled. What it means only
> matters from the point of view of authoring the content in the first
> place; after the content is authored, what matters is how it is processed.

I suppose it was inevitable we'd end up back here 8-(

But no, that's not the case.  How it's handled/processed depends upon
the type of user agent.  Browsers might handle things one way, screen
readers another, and spiders yet another.  Sure, there might be *some*
common behaviour between *some* classes of agent, but there's only
*two* things which are common to *all* agents, past, present, and
future; the shared understanding of the meaning of the document, and
the recognition of the text/html media type.  That's why it is
essential that the media type registration reference a specification
which defines that meaning.

>> FWIW, I had a look through the obsolete list last night and found some
>> which had properly defined semantics.  For example, "plaintext" was
>> defined to mean the same thing as "pre".  That's good, and what we
>> should strive for for the examples given by Julian.
>
> If you think that what is said for <plaintext> (i.e. a UA conformance
> requirement on the processing of the obselete feature)

I paid close attention to how you phrased it, but it's essentially
indistinguishable from saying "plaintext means the same thing as pre",
so I gave you that one 8-)

> is acceptable, then
> what features are lacking these requirements?

I will look for more, but for now, let's just get those two attributes defined.

Mark.

Received on Thursday, 3 September 2009 04:36:27 UTC