All these specialised tags seem so completely redundant. Why do we need a sanctioned header and footer and time tag? Why wouldn't you just make tag names open ended and control the presentation with CSS? Why on earth can't we use arbitrary attribute names, instead we have to use this clunky data attribute. It's truly ridiculous.<p>This is how I hear W3C announcements on such things:<p>"A specialist committee of 500 have reviewed a sample of so-called 'internet sites' as found on the so-called 'internet'. We have noticed that often times people like to have so-called 'headers' and 'footers' in their website. We have decided then that in your best interests that we have officially sanctioned a <header> and <footer> tag. Thank you, thank you. We also have noticed that occasionally people put times and dates in their web pages. Therefore we have sanctioned a <date> tag for your convenience. We are glad to contribute to the evolution of the web."<p>It is so arbitrary and detached from real world web development. This isn't 'bringing the web forward' in any sense. I don't know what the answer is but it certainly isn't this.
I'm so glad about this response from W3C (I do criticize the general bureaucracy of W3C though). In many aspects, I felt that the recent moves of the HTML living standard were much like that of XHTML2:<p>- Why do keep the redundant <a> element while we can add the href attribute to all elements?<p>- Why do keep <br> while we can generalize the line structure via <nl>? (NB: I'm not sure about the exact element name)<p>Is removing <time> in favor of <data> really different from these statements?
I like the followup message:<p><i>I respectfully request that the <time> rollback happen at 2am on Sunday.</i><p><a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Nov/0012.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Nov/0012...</a><p>(Probably only funny if you have had to do timezone handling in your code before)