- From: Dão Gottwald <dao@design-noir.de>
- Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 09:50:37 +0200
- To: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- CC: "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
Jonas Sicking schrieb: > > 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 still think it would be beneficial all in all. A prefix for predefined classes would suffer from the same problem as the role attribute: most authors wouldn't use it. It's also not obvious to a novice what such a prefix means, or how role differs from class. > 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. Yes, a follow-up to <http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/classes.html> would be nice. --Dao
Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 07:50:48 UTC