Re: The equivalence of <title> with the title property

Steven Pemberton wrote:
>
> As I edited the minutes of the call, I noticed Shane's remark on IRC 
> for the first time:
>
> "ShaneM: Note that the RDFa spec does not say that something with a 
> property of dc:title is the same as / overrides the title element."
>
> That is absolutely true. But the XHTML2 spec says:
>
> "The title of a document is metadata about the document, and so a 
> title like <title>About W3C</title> is equivalent to <meta about="" 
> property="title">About W3C</meta>."
>
> So we say that the title element is semantically equivalent to the 
> html:title property (and I hope we say the same about the title 
> attribute somewhere, I need to check; no we don't, needs to be added).
We do not, and have never, said that the title attribute is semantically 
equivalent to the title element.  And I don't think that it is.  @title 
refers to a title for a given element and its contents.  a @title on the 
body element *might* be construed as the title for the document, but 
would be counter to the I18N concerns we are trying to address in XHTML 2.
>
> For this reason, I would also like to propose that we remove the 
> requirement that there MUST be a title element in every <head>.
I think I would object to that - it would mean that incremental 
rendering would become impossible.  At the very least a user agent needs 
to discover the title of a document quickly so it can put SOMETHING on 
the window while it is processing and rendering.  If we do not require 
the title element, then a document would need to be completely parsed 
and processed before the primary title could be discovered.


-- 
Shane P. McCarron                          Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
Managing Director                            Fax: +1 763 786-8180
ApTest Minnesota                            Inet: shane@aptest.com

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2007 16:28:11 UTC