iabervon's Journal: Dang W3C...

I wish the W3C would quit breaking HTML. You'd think they'd do sensible things like not deprecating all ways of achieving a semantically meaningful effect. I just ran into this issue:

You used to be able to have an ordered list which started at whatever value you wanted. This is important if, for example, you're listing items which are in a zero-based array. Conventionally, HTML lists start with 1, so a list of items in an Java array really needs to have the starting number set; otherwise it is misleading.

Here is what the HTML 4 specification says about this situation: "Deprecated". Nevermind that this has a semantic meaning, is the only way to continue a list across intervening text (as is the standard format for, say, the field of linguistics), and cannot sensibly be done with stylesheets.

It is particularly odd that the W3C seems to do a good job with many of their standards, but their most heavily-used standard is regularly broken, such that it totally fails to serve its original purpose and cannot be used in the ay it is intended.