

More Like Widening HTML5 Gyre Amirite? - ZeroGravitas
http://modcult.org/read/2010/2/15/more-like-widening-html5-gyre-amirite

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barrkel
His pmarca vs TBL point is way off, IMHO. <img> vs <a rel="embed, present"> is
a matter of syntax, not semantics; for Mosaic to have changed their IMG
support to use A instead need only have affected their parser (depending on
how far they retained the specific DOM nodes into the presentation graph).

It wasn't a case of pragmatic engineering trumping academic idealism. TBL's
suggestion actually makes more engineering sense to me than an IMG tag, as it
wouldn't necessarily be limited to images, would be more future-proof for e.g.
automated downloaders trying to discover everything needed for a cached copy
of a document (all A with REL including EMBED) etc.

Finally, I find this bit incredibly disingenuous:

"I don’t know anything about this masinter guy, but he sounds like a normal,
non-dick, reasonable engineer:

"'I think progress of HTML5 in W3C could be faster if the subsections on
graphics and metadata could (if not now, then eventually) be moved to separate
subgroups [...]'"

The crucial bit being that "this masinter guy" works for Adobe. If it were up
to me to try and sabotage HTML5's graphics support, suggesting that moving it
out to somewhere else would "speed things up" would be exactly how I'd go
about it.

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AndrewDucker
I dunno about you, but I can always remember <img>, whereas anything more
complex than the basic <a href=""> completely fails to stick in my head.

From a simple usability point of view <img> wins.

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barrkel
Syntax familiarity is proportional to usage. IOW, I'm pretty sure that if you
had to use a different form to insert images, you would remember it just as
easily now. Even with IMG as it is now, you have to remember to use src,
rather than href as used with A.

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AndrewDucker
Except that remembering the image source is much easier than remember the "A",
which ISTR is the Anchor, but that never made sense to me either, as I'm not
anchoring anything.

