- From: Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl>
- Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 20:41:22 +0200
- To: Orion Adrian <orion.adrian@gmail.com>
- CC: www-html@w3.org
Orion Adrian schreef:
>>> I disagree, for element names should carry the main semantics, and
>>> prefer myself something like this:
>>>
>>> <"some parent with only block children allowed">
>>> <code class="pre"/>
>>> </>
>>>
>> I disagree with that, class doesn't convey any semantic information, and
>> if the code being preformatted is important to the clarity or even
>> functioning of the code, it should use <pre> appropriately and not rely
>> on the stylesheet.
>>
> Why doesn't class convey semantic information?
Because it doesn’t, per specification. Quoting:
The class attribute has several roles in HTML:
* As a style sheet selector (when an author wishes to assign
style information to a set of elements).
* For general purpose processing by user agents.
> Why aren't we styling
> elements based on their semantic classification as opposed to string
> that people just make up like "l76blue". I'd rather limit class to
> semantic structures and just style those.
>
But that is not the case right now, in HTML 4, and existing content will
contain nonsensical information in their class attributes, which makes
them useless to process. A set of values for the class attribute could
be standardised, but because there’s so much ‘noise’, it can’t be relied
upon, which makes it quite unreliable and useless from a machine
processing point of view (which is why they are added in the first place).
I’d say that is the reason new attributes such as @role and @property
are needed. Those can make a fresh start, and because they are only
specified when they actually have semantic meaning, a user agent
(including search engines) can do something with it...
~Grauw
--
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.
Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2005 18:41:29 UTC