[whatwg] Joe Clark's Criticisms of the WHATWG and HTML 5

[James Graham]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:24:17 +0100, Christoph Päper 
> <christoph.paeper at crissov.de> wrote:
>> And HTML5 isn't that semantically pure anyway.
> 
> Where can it be improved?

To take a slight detour into the (hopefully not too) abstract, what do 
people think the fundamental point of semantics in HTML is? Henri has 
been talking about the possibility of making HTML5 more "semantically 
lax", and here Anne is interested in where it is not "semantically 
pure", presumably with a desire to fixing it. I'm not sure that these 
views are necessarily contradictory because I don't really know what 
people mean by "lax" or "pure". I also don't know which view best fits 
my position because I don't really understand what people are trying to 
achieve with (the markup in) HTML -- I think there are things I would 
change in the current draft, but there seems little point talking about 
which markup elements should or shouldn't exist without having some 
overall framework against which the merit of various proposals can be 
measured.

-- 
"The universe doesn't care what you believe. The wonderful thing about 
science is that it doesn't ask for your faith, it just asks for your 
eyes" --- http://xkcd.com/c154.html