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

Nicholas Shanks contact at nickshanks.com
Fri Mar 23 07:08:16 PDT 2007


On 23 Mar 2007, at 13:17, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:40:47 +0100, Nicholas Shanks  
> <contact at nickshanks.com> wrote:
>> Mostly unused, not even deprecated, these elements bloat the spec,
>> confuse lay authors (i.e. those not of a computer science background)
>> and I feel would be better represented by a custom XML vocabulary.
>
> How does that help anyone? Putting them in a custom XML vocabulary  
> drops all semantics directly. (Unless a search engine does some  
> heuristics on element names I suppose.) Custom XML vocabularies are  
> really not something you want to have on the web as its implied  
> they have no known semantics.

Not true.
XHTML, MathML and SVG are all custom vocabularies with very widely  
known semantics.
There's nothing preventing a future "CodeML" syntax from being  
understood by Koders and Google Code Search.

- Nicholas.
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