- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 23:55:44 -0700
- To: Dão Gottwald <dao@design-noir.de>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Dão Gottwald wrote: > > Jonas Sicking schrieb: >> Dão Gottwald wrote: >>> >>> Jonas Sicking schrieb: >>>> >>>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >>>>> On May 4, 2007, at 9:30 AM, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote: >>>>>> One of the most exciting (to me) developments in the XHTML camp is >>>>>> the >>>>>> emergence of the ROLE attribute - as it now provides a means of >>>>>> "explaining" >>>>>> what something is or does... To quote the W3C spec: >>>>>> "The role attribute takes as its value one or more white-space >>>>>> separated >>>>>> QNames. The attribute describes the role(s) the current element >>>>>> plays in the >>>>>> context of the document. <snip> It could also be used as a >>>>>> mechanism for >>>>>> annotating portions of a document in a domain specific way (e.g., >>>>>> a legal >>>>>> term taxonomy)." >>>>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/#s_role_module_attributes >>>>> >>>>> The purpose of the "role" attribute is addressed in HTML5 by the >>>>> "class" attribute, along with predefined classes. >>>> >>>> Personally I think this was a very poor decision. The problem is >>>> that you have user names and standard names mixed in the same >>>> namespace. So there's a big risk that the user accidentally ends up >>>> marking semantic meaning to their elements simply by wanting to >>>> style them. >>> >>> Umm. You consider enriching the semantics of markup "by accident" a >>> bug, not a feature? Even if the author added class="copyright" for >>> styling purposes, what's the problem with telling the user agent and >>> thereby the user that there's copyright information? >> >> It's fine if it happens to be the right semantic, sure. But it's very >> likely that they'll add that to elements that has an entierly >> different meaning, thereby adding the wrong semantic to it. > > You're sure that it would be "very likely"? My assumption is that the > hits would outnumber the false positives by far. "role", on the other > hand, would probably only be used by authors that care about semantics > and accessibility. No, of course I'm not sure. But it does seem likely that it'll be wrong often enough. I guess it's possible to do a survey today on a number of sites and see what classnames they are using and how they are used. Would definitely be interesting. / Jonas
Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 06:58:17 UTC