What's happening to HTML? 17 May 2007

It was only a month ago that we were asking "what's happening to web accessibility?". Now its HTML's turn.

From Roger Johansson:

"What is currently going on in the W3C HTML Working Group is very disappointing and something I never expected to see when I joined it. I was naive enough to think that everybody joining the HTML WG would be doing so out of a desire to improve the Web. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case:

• There are people who argue against the value of semantics and in favour of keeping or even adding more presentational markup.
• In the HTML 5/Web Applications 1.0 Working Draft, accessibility features such as the summary, headers, and axis attributes (which are used to make data tables more accessible) have been removed with no explanation.
• The general knowledge of accessibility in the Working Group is surprisingly limited.
• Some of the loudest voices are browser vendors who seem to have an extreme phobia of doing anything to discourage the use of invalid and inaccessible tag soup.

"All in all, my impression so far is that unless things change, the next version of HTML will do nothing to improve the Web. All it will do is make things easier for browser vendors and ignorant web developers. The rest of us may be better off sticking to HTML 4.01 Strict."

These are dark days in the world of web standards :-'(