Re: [whatwg] Section 3 semantics and structure

(-whatwg to reduce cross-posting)

On Sat, 2 May 2009, Shelley Powers wrote:
> 
> In section three, you mix structure and semantics, but the two are not 
> necessarily compatible.

How are they not?


> For instance, we see an introduction to the Document, and then 
> immediately proceed into a description of Documents in the DOM. Frankly, 
> I don't see how a description of the DOM fits either structure or 
> semantics. To me, structure would be the structure of the markup in the 
> document, and the semantics would be the, well, it's hard to say what it 
> would be, you apply semantics to elements, such as section and header. 
> Whatever it is, it's not DOM related.

Would it help if I renamed the section something like "HTML documents"?


> Perhaps if the intro section was filled in, we would have an 
> understanding of what you mean by structure, and semantics. Right now, 
> though, I see what is basically a bucket of information, somehow grouped 
> under this heading, perhaps because it doesn't fit anywhere else.

That's more or less accurate, yes.


> Now you do a nice description of what you consider as semantics in 
> section 3.3.1, and I would expect this, then, to be followed by a 
> listing of the elements, but again, there's the DOM. There's no cohesive 
> pattern to the document, especially when the different document levels 
> are mixed so haphazardly.

I've tried several ways of organising the document; unfortunately it is 
non-trivial because of the weird inter-relations between each section. I'm 
not a big fan of the current scheme but it is better than what we had 
before. If you have any concrete suggestions for better organisation 
schemes please do let me know.


> I, as a web developer/designer, am not really interested in the user 
> agent aspects of the specs. Another person who is a designer, may not be 
> interested in the developer or UA aspects. But all of us are forced to 
> go through material addressed to all three audiences just to find the 
> information we need.

Actually if you want to hide the implementation-specific stuff you can 
switch to the alternative stylesheet "Author documentation only".


> I, a designer interested in learning about the new semantic elements, 
> have to wade through sections on the DOM and security, including 
> cookies, because I'm not sure when I'll be getting to the bits I need. 
> There's no clear demarcation between audiences in the document.

If you want to see all the text but have it clearely demarked, you can 
enable the "Highlight implementation requirements" alternative stylesheet.

HTH,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 5 June 2009 22:01:28 UTC