Re: Removal of other semantic elements

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 7:24 PM, Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>>> Hi Steven,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your response, comments in detail below. However I note
>>> that you didn't actually answer my question. The question is, what are
>>> your feelings regarding the various issues and change proposals to
>>> remove various specific semantic elements and attributes from HTML5?:
>>
>> Took this to www-archives, since it's not really relevant to the discussion...
>>
>> Steve will answer or not, but I'm curious: are you going to ask the
>> other 419 members of this group their opinion, too?
>>
>> Steve will do what he wants to do, but I also brought up a list of
>> other issues specific to the change proposals, as did Laura Carlson.
>> Will you be answering any of these, or responding to either of us?
>
> I'm simply asking Stevens opinion as someone who has more experience
> in accessibility than me, and so I value his opinion. More
> importantly, Stevens emails have been much less clear than yours, thus
> I'm asking for clarification. Your change proposal makes your opinion
> much more clear, and so I have no need ask further.
>
> / Jonas
>

As Steve helped clarify so well yesterday, my change proposals really
aren't about accessibility. Not at their core.

The real core of the proposal is whether it's better to attempt to
create single purpose elements representing well defined and broadly
used widget behaviors created using JavaScript and CSS. My contention
is to do so will most likely fail, because whatever is created in the
browsers based on HTML specs can never hope to keep up with the state
of the art using the JS and CSS. And we developers and designers will
only use whatever is state of the art. And we'll only use what we can
control, style, design, and customize.

Additionally, attempting to create as single purposed elements any of
the widget behaviors opens the door for innumerable objects that will
create significant problems and cost for developers, tool builders,
content management systems, and yes, even browser makers. Frankly, I'd
rather you all spent time making your browsers faster, better, more
secure, than re-creating what we better can create using our favorite
libraries.

But this is getting back on topic, and best left for the HTML WG.

Shelley

Received on Monday, 5 April 2010 12:25:17 UTC