[whatwg] [html5] thoughts

[Anne van Kesteren]

>> It would be nice to know what the WG thinks of this. Will the WG 
>> restrict themselves to extending Web Forms and Web Applications in 
>> HTML or will some other aspects, that are less relevant (for this 
>> WG, at least), be addressed as well?
> 
> Like what?

Semantic elements (things that are not related to forms or applications,
but would make sense in HTML 5.0). Having an element NAME would be very
useful. I recently spotted a very nice proposal on www-html-editor for
making Q backwards compatible[1]:

# No, I don't think that's the basic problem. The basic problem is that
# <q> was designed not to degrade gracefully. Browsers that do not
# recognize or do not support <q> markup now render just the context,
# omitting the potentially vital information that it's a quotation.
# Markup like <q><qm>"</qm>To be or not to be, that is the
# question<qm>"</qm>.</q> would degrade gracefully. Here qm elements
# would contain quotation marks that are to be omitted by user agents
# that support the q element.
# (Cf. to ideas of Ruby markup.)

(If WHATWG will do these kind of things I think this certainly should be
included, since it is all about being backwards compatible and this
would make HTML more backwards compatible than it currently is, at
least, for the Q element.)

Other changes that I would like to see is deprecation of certain
elements and attributes. Elements like BIG, SMALL and ACRONYM perhaps.
Attributes would be CELLPADDING and CELLSPACING. There might be more, if
this is part of the direction WHATWG is going to take I will investigate
them and post them on the list.


[1]<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2004JulSep/0089.html>


-- 
  Anne van Kesteren
  <http://annevankesteren.nl/>