[whatwg] ---

Pentasis pentasis at lavabit.com
Tue Nov 4 09:25:54 PST 2008


>> The X/HTML spec reads too much like a law and leave little or no room for 
>> the creative
>> designer minds that eventually need to work with it.
> Creative designer minds working on rendering engines and DOM
> properties ? Sorry, but one "creative" vendor (MS) apparently is enough
> to throw the web off balance ... and no reasonable sane person wants to
> repeat that.

I think here you may well have said exactly what is wrong with this whole 
browser-vendors doing standards problem.

Who ever said that the standards are here for browsers?????????
Just because browsers need to implement the standards does NOT, I repeat NOT 
mean they are written for browser vendors.
Especially not the HTML standards. (I would sooner agree with you on this 
point regarding CSS than HTML).

HTML is a markup language that is meant to describe how content is to be 
"tagged" so it can be retrieved based on markup.
This has absolutely nothing, and I mean NOTHING to do with browsers, 
screenreaders, bots, or even humans as far as I am concerned. It is a sec 
standard describing the hooks that exist in the real world that have existed 
and evolved since mankind could write and later publish. Humans, UAs, bots, 
etc. only need to know about these hooks and either implement them or use 
them as described.

You mention the DOM for example. Good, the DOM is a way of describing how 
HTML can be implemented in a browser. If you as browser vendors want to 
describe that and agree upon it amongst yourselves...fine, I would welcome 
that. But I fail to see why this means you have any right to change HTML 
itself in the process.

If you want a standard that describes how browsers or UAs in general must 
deal with HTML than write THAT standard, but leave HTML out of it please.

Bert 





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