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Bug 21554 - make hgroup non-conforming (as far as document conformance)
Summary: make hgroup non-conforming (as far as document conformance)
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: PC All
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-04-02 18:04 UTC by Michael[tm] Smith
Modified: 2013-04-22 22:38 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Attachments

Description Michael[tm] Smith 2013-04-02 18:04:00 UTC
I think it makes sense to consider dropping hgroup from the spec as a conforming element, while keeping the UA requirements for processing it as-is (e.g., any parts of the parsing algorithm, and anything in the default UA stylesheet). 

Despite having been in the spec for quite a while now, usage of hgroup does not really seem to have caught on widely in the Web-authoring community, and as far as I know, no browsers actually fully implement support for hgroup per spec.

Also, the HTML WG recently made a decision to drop hgroup as conforming from the HTML CR spec -- though no decision has been made to drop it from the LS=like W3C HTML "Nightly" spec.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Apr/0003.html
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-04-14 20:23:34 UTC
Based on some internal data (sample size ~10 billion pages), it looks like the ratio of pages that contain <aside> to pages that contain <hgroup> is about 4:1. Which seems about right. It's certainly plenty enough pages to keep around, especially if we're not changing the UA requirements. It's more pages than use obscure things like <samp>.

For things where the browsers support the feature anyway, the barrier to keeping the element in the language as conforming is somewhat lower, since the gain of removing it is so low.
Comment 3 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-04-22 22:38:37 UTC
WONTFIX per comment 2.