Re: WD-xhtml2-20021211 comments

*John Lewis* <lewi0371@mrs.umn.edu>:
>
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-xhtml2-20021211/>:
>
> I can't find any mention of the cite element. Has it been removed (and
> if so, why)? Is there, or will there be, a replacement?

If, it couldn't be replaced by just one element.

> I favor the removal of strong, the numbered headings (h1-h6), and hr.

AOL.

> Why get rid of hr:

I've not yet been presented a usecase for it, that couldn't be satisfied with
CSS or an image.

> I admit there are situations where it could possibly be useful,
> but I don't think such situations constitute a *need* for hr.

Yeah, there's a bunch of possible elements with a much higher need.


My additions (after a quick oversight)
---------------------------------------------

6.4. Edit Collection
I support the removal of del and ins, although I actually used them.

6.5. Hypertext Attribute Collection
Die, target, die! Well, actually there might be use for it, but I still don't
see it in the example given (XFrames).

7.3 The title Element

  <title>The Document's Title<!-- of the Document--></title>

is not allowed? At least this is (for me) implied by "may not contain other
markup (including comments)".

8.1. The abbr element
I'm fine with the acronym element being gone as it removes confusion, but abbr
should learn an attribute to designate at least abbreviations, acronyms and
initialisms. Foreign languages may as well have other kinds.
Should the title attribute be used for the spelt out version of the enclosed
term, e.g. for aural UAs, or does it need an extra attribute? I sometimes want
to provide also the translation of an abbreviation, but if I put it into the
title attribute, a speech synthesizing browser might read both, but shan't.
Example: <abbr title="id est" replace="that is">i. e.</abbr>.

8.3. The blockquote element & 8.12. The quote element
Do they still need the cite attribute when they could also use href? I'm unsure.
cite could still point to some urn:isbn and href to an online bookstore.
Personally I liked q better than quote. Not just that I think inline elements
should have as short names as possible, but also the concept of automatic quote
signs. I could still insert them with CSS ::before and ::after, but in opposite
to traditional q this will degrade badly in non-CSS browsers. Of course q
degraded bad in HTML 3.2 UAs, but that shouldn't concern a "brand new" markup
language without required backward compatibility.

8.4. The code element
I recently started to designate different code snippets with a class attribute,
e.g. <code class="css">. I wonder if code may gain value with a language
attribute. A UA may offer to open the text, when marked, in the appropriate
editor or use proprietary syntax highlighting code then.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see a blocklevel version of code
(and samp), to avoid "<pre><code>". Child elements more sophisticated than the
current code and var are probably too much for a simple ML like HTML.

8.5. The dfn element
dfn and dt are similar. Would it be possible and valid to merge them?

8.13. The samp element
May this be extended to include all kinds of samples and examples.

9.1. The a element
In one example the deceased name attribute is used.

10. XHTML List Module
name ist not only a bad choice, as it intuitively stands for real life names (I
currently [mis]use cite for those) and not the name of the parent element, but
it also should be in all list style. Why not use h or caption instead?

11.1.2. Links and external style sheets
?xml-stylesheet should at least be mentioned.
| In the following example, we tell search engines
Why "search engines" and not "user agents"?

13.1. The object element
Without some way to specify a caption, object is pretty useless seeing that
almost any element supports embedding, i.e. the src attribute.
I welcome meta to be no longer an empty element, but so should be the very
similar param element.

14.2. The sub element & 14.3. The sup element
Drop in favor of a new index element or the like. There should be no need for a
Presentation Module.
"Mlle" in the (double) example lacks a abbr element.

16. XHTML Server-Side Image Map Module
As nearly every element could be substitued by an image (embedding attributes)
it doesn't make sense to limit ismap to object (or is it input and img (!)).

18. XHTML Tables Module
Either order the elements from small to big (td to table) or big to small. Now
it's completely mixed up, not even tbody and thead & tfoot are defined next to
each other.

18.2. The col and colgroup elements
Isn't one nestable element (col) enough?

18.3. The table element
IMO tr shouldn't be allowed to be child, just grand-child of table. But that's
propably just me.

18.3.4. Sample table
<caption><b> is bad. It's labeled "Calendar for 2002", but features just the
first quarter. SMTWTFS are column headers, but in no way marked up as such. A
week starts at Monday. March 31st should be a Sunday in the ASCII sample
rendering. Why ASCII art /and/ GIF? Maybe empty cells should be denoted xmlish
as <td/>.
Actually I'd use onetable per month.

18.4. The tbody element
I wonder if it should be nestable. To make tr nestable and remove tbody would be
possible, but the worse option.

18.5.1. Cells that span several rows or columns
The second example has two errors (missing </tr> & a / in a <tr>).


Sometimes "`" and "'" are together used for single quote signs. That's wrong
usage in English, which uses &lsquo; and &rsquo; (too lazy to check Unicode
numbers).

Christoph Päper

Received on Friday, 13 December 2002 18:47:02 UTC