Re: Getting beyond the ping pong match (was RE: Cleaning House)

On Sun, 6 May 2007, Lachlan Hunt wrote:

> It would really help if the people who are objecting to the predefined class 
> names could find real world evidence to support their claims of clashes, and 
> explain precisely what real practical problems can occur from it.

This indicates an irresponsible approach where class names are taken into 
specific meanings arbitrarily. If you think you can pick up some values 
from the hitherto unregulated space of class names and assign meanings to 
them by the taste of some people, I don't think any evidence of prior 
usage would convince you of anything. _You_ should have studied at least a 
million or so*) pages, checked for the use of class names you intend to 
put into your specification, deduced their meanings, and presented the 
results. _You_ are intending to change the semantics of existing pages. 
Don't try to put the burden of proof on _me_.

*) Preferably, a few billions of pages, of course. An indexing robot and 
human study of a sample of pages containing the intended names as class 
names might have been sufficient. Troublesome, but doable. If you don't 
like the idea of having to do such things, don't mess around with class 
names (or at least use e.g. class="!copyright", exactly _because_ "!" is 
not allowed by any HTML specification so far).

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Sunday, 6 May 2007 06:25:54 UTC