- From: John Whelan <whelan@itp.unibe.ch>
- Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 06:27:10 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
Christian Ottosson wrote: > At 1999-10-24T22:04+02:00, Håkon Wium Lie wrote: >> Perhaps someone should start collecting a list of "standard" class >> names? > As Kjetil Kjernsmo already has said, I don't think class names are a good > substitute for semantic markup. IMHO we shouldn't be so afraid of defining > new structural, phrasal markup. In the long run, it would enrich the HTML > in the way it was ment. And (not the main issue for me though) it doesn't > even cause any backward compability problems. Although there is the drawback that since current browsers can only recognize elements that they have heard of, it's not possible to supplement the new structure with CSS for presentational purposes. So for example <dfn style="text-style:italic">aardvark</dfn> will not show up in italics in Netscape 4 (because the browser can't tell whether <dfn> is an opening tag or a stand-alone element) while <span style="text-style:italic">aardvark</span> will. OTOH, in XHTML opening tags and stand-alones look different, and a browser in XML mode should be able to add style information to an element even if it doesn't know what the element means. John T. Whelan whelan@iname.com http://www.slack.net/~whelan/
Received on Wednesday, 27 October 1999 06:28:27 UTC