2015-02-18, 22:55, Ian Hickson wrote:
If you wish to create a valid and semantically correct document according to the most recently published HTML standard, then using <hgroup> is fine.
I think you meant to say that <hgroup> is in the WHATWG document at present (and you added that you do not plan to remove it from there).
There is strictly speaking only one HTML standard, namely ISO/IEC 15445. Few people know about it, still fewer care about it. (It’s just HTML 4.01 written in more standardese.)
The W3C calls their recommendations “standards”. (I think this is a rather recent change.)
The IETF calls some of their documents “Internet Standards”, which is somewhat odd, but irrelevant to HTML, as IETF abandoned work on HTML after HTML 2.0.
The WHATWG calls their documents “living standards”, which is really an oxymoron.
Everyone could write a specification, with or without his brother, and call it a “standard”. Actually, you can never know which one is the most recent “standard” in that sense.
So what really matters is that there are different players in the fields of defining HTML, and there is no authority to rule them all. Every author/developer/designer/whatever needs to decide how to deal with this. Asking one of the players about the rules will most probably yield just the obvious answer.
I recommend using the validator.nu service rather than the W3C one. They're basically the same but the validator.nu one is closer to the WHATWG spec's requirements than the W3C one.
The relationship between the two is somewhat obscure, but it is in that direction. What the different validators check against is really their authors’ idea of what is correct HTML, so we have yet another “standard”, defined very implicitly, and mutable. But it indeed appears to be closer to WHATWG HTML than to W3C HTML5.
The bottom line is that validators are just useful tools, at best. All HTML5 validators are experimental software that checks against some rules that have not been disclosed in detail but are supposed to match some idea of “HTML5”.
Yucca
