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

[Mike Schinkel]

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

>> 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 ... 

It does matter. It is not just one of the important things, it is THE
important thing.  Having two divergent HTMLs will create problems for a vast
number of people and will significantly reduce efficiencies for anyone that
has to deal with it. Worse, it could cause the non-technical public to
decide that HTML its just too much trouble, and THAT would be a tragedy.

The irony is I'm not proposing much; just have as a design axiom that the
trajectory of HTML5 and XHTML should aimed toward convergence when
technically possible.

-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org/