log

September 9, 2010

Arrrggghhhhh

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10581

I am an HTML author since 1994, a JS & PHP pro­gram­mer, and a teacher in those three fields. I will use this fea­ture. My stu­dents are excit­ed about this fea­ture. This fea­ture is easy to use, clean­ly solves a com­mon need in Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems and oth­er web apps, is back­wards-com­pat­i­ble with exist­ing user agents, great­ly improves acces­si­bil­i­ty by allow­ing user agents to adjust the pick­er for OS-native acces­si­bil­i­ty set­tings and tools, works in restrict­ed envi­ron­ments where JavaScript sup­port isn’t avail­able, and can be over­rid­den by spe­cialised JavaScript libraries should advanced func­tion­al­i­ty be required. Oh yes, sure, remove the fea­ture. Brilliant.

Can I file a Change Pro­pos­al to remove the Shel­ley sec­tion from the HTML Work­ing Group? This sec­tion con­sis­tent­ly goes against real-world use cas­es, wastes read­er CPU cycles with need­less ver­biage and appears to be ignored by implementers.

Every time I open my HTMLWG mail fold­er I’m remind­ed as to why the prac­ti­cal tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion is held on WHATWG.