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Re: HTML specs - can I whine for a minute?

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From: Steve Green
Date: Aug 19, 2021 12:39PM

Let me join you in the whining. All the documentation relating to HTML5, WCAG and ARIA is a complete mess. The ambiguities, contradictions and omissions are bad enough, but there is no discernible information architecture either. It's nigh-on impossible to find out what the latest version of anything is, and in some cases there are multiple similar, but different, versions of documents, sometimes with the same version number. Some are in GitHub, which I am told take precedence over those on the W3C website, which is entirely non-intuitive.

Sometimes you just have to know that documents exist, because they don't seem to be discoverable.

Perhaps it all makes sense to the people who create and maintain the documentation, but makes no sense to some of us who dip in and out periodically.

Worse still, some are so-called "living documents", which can change in any way at any time, yet there doesn't appear to be any way for us to be notified of the changes. There doesn't even seem to be any version control or archiving for such documents, so you sometimes cannot find content you are certain used to exist. Or maybe there is and I just can't find it.

Fortunately, the Internet and accessibility are entirely unimportant, so none of this really matters.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd