[whatwg] Authoring tools (was Graceful Degradation and MimeTypes)

[Andrew Fedoniouk]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Schinkel" <mikeschinkel at gmail.com>
To: "'Sander Tekelenburg'" <tekelenb at euronet.nl>; <whatwg at whatwg.org>

[skiped]

>
>>> But there is no way HTML 5 can define everything that
>>> people might possibly throw at the Web.
>
> I think you misunderstand what I propose.  I propose that XHTML and HTML5
> move on a convergence path as opposed to a divergence path.  I'm not
> suggesting it handle everything people want; quite the contrary. I'm just
> suggesting they both do their best to both handle things the same way, as
> much as possible, and that if it is valid in XHTML then HTML5 should 
> accept
> it whenever technically possible.
>
> -Mike Schinkel
> http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
> http://www.welldesignedurls.org/
>

Any technology to be widely accepted shall establish good set of 
motivations.
Ideally new technology shall bring benefits to all actors or parties 
involved.
Groups involved in acceptance of,  say, new version of HTML on
the Web are:
1) web designers,
2) UA developers,
3) web administrators,
3) end users (indirectly),
4) CSP, web application developers,
5) groups of influence: web purists, web journalists, web theorists.
6) (did I miss someone here?)

If, say, HTML5 will have some "really cool feature" that will make groups 1 
and 2
happy then it does not matter will HTML5 be compatible with XHTML or not.
XHTML has some benefits for groups 4, 5 and 6 so ...
Compatibility is a good thing in general, though. Compatibility is what 
group
#2 will be interested in.

I beleive that we should keep this list in mind while designing HTML5, CSS5, 
etc.
Otherwise group #5 will die on duty trying to convince everybody above.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com