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HTML5 says (in the section "Authoring tools and markup generators"): "Authoring tools are expected to come in two broad varieties: tools that work from structure or semantic data, and tools that work on a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get media-specific editing basis (WYSIWYG). The former is the preferred mechanism for tools that author HTML, since the structure in the source information can be used to make informed choices regarding which HTML elements and attributes are most appropriate." AUWG Comment: It seems subjective to prefer an editing mechanism. Perhaps this should be clearly marked as "informative".
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: This isn't really subjective, it's simply a fact that you are more likely to create accessible (and conforming) documents if you are working at the semantic level rather than at a presentational level. I don't think that softening this would be productive. Readers should be made very aware of this problem with the WYSIWYG approach, at least until such time as the state of the art in WYSIWYG editors improves significantly.
Per the proposal at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Jan/0245.html, the HTML A11Y TF does not plan to formally work on this issue at this time. This does not mean the TF has no interest in it, but does not have immediate plans to work on it. The TF may review the issue in the future.