[whatwg] [web-apps] Some comments

[Olav Junker Kjær]

> A good point. Could you possibly elaborate on what you specifically 
> want as a baseline? Clearly, WA1 HTML markup that is capable of 
> gracefully degrading should degrade into HTML 4.01, but I'm not sure 
> that's what you meant. 

I'm not even sure what graceful degradation means :-)
A working definition could be: When a document uses features that the UA 
does not support, it should not lead to errors or to confusion for the 
user. The user should not be exposed to non-working features, and the 
document as a whole should still be usable.

I think the baseline should be defined pragmatically, based on what 
browsers and configurations that the average websites today cater for.

I would say Internet Explorer 5+, Opera 7+, Mozilla based browser, and 
other modern browsers. If a site want to cater to older browsers like 
Netscape 4 and at the same time use WAML, they might have to do server 
sniffing. This is a reasonable trade off.

I have seen some statistics that says that 10% has scripting turned off. 
Therefore this should be taken into consideration. Modern screen readers 
and other assistive technology should be taken into consideration.

Olav Junker Kjær

PS. I wish Mosaic had introduced an attribute to declare how 
unrecognized tags should be handled, e.g legacy="ignore" would ignore 
the element including contents, legacy="render" would render the element 
as if it was a span, legacy="render-contents" would ignore the element 
but render its contents. Maybe we should introduce the attribute now, 
and reap the benefits in 10-15 years :-)