- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 12:38:00 -0500
- To: liorean <liorean@gmail.com>
- Cc: "HTML WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Hi liorean, On Aug 6, 2007, at 12:25 PM, liorean wrote: > On 06/08/07, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: >> Leif Halvard Silli wrote: >> >>> This argument here doesn't solve «real problems». >>> We are all in favour of accessibility. And we [] >>> are also all against semantics for the sake of semantics. >> >> No we're not. Some of us (myself included) believe that >> semantics for semantics [sake] is fundamental to high- >> quality markup. > > I think people have a slightly different view on the meaning of > "semantics for the sake of semantics". The way I read that, "semantics > for the sake of semantics" is including semantics without a use case, > without any real world use of the semantics - they are just included > for the purpose of having the semantics in the language. In my book, > that's bad. > > I've seen others argue that "semantics for the sake of semantics" goes > for most element, attribute or relations semantics that can be found > in HTML already the language, but I disagree. If you have semantics > with clear use cases, you no longer have "semantics for the sake of > semantics", you have semantics for the sake of making those use cases > possible. The problem with the way you're categorizing this, however, is that no one ever proposes a semantic without a use-case. Sure they may forget to offer the use-case upfront (e.g., VIDEO, AUDIO, etc). but they most likely have a use-case in mind. Every proposed extension to HTML should be semantic (I think most of us agree on that). And I'm sure we all understand don't propose a semantic that doesn't have a use-case (which goes completely without saying). I would go even further and say that there are an infinity of semantics with use- cases that we should leave out of the language because they're too esoteric[1]. Using a phrase like "semantics for the sake of semantics" is either just disparaging other's ideas in a very unhelpful way, or it's a misunderstanding of HTML's purpose. Either way, ti's probably a phrase we should avoid. Take care, Rob [1]: For example the element i posed in an earlier email: IRONYINTHEWAYSHAKESPEAREUSEDITINTHE2NDACTOFAHMLET. This element is a semantic element. It has a use-case (an author no less than Shakespeare could use it). However, it's too esoteric to include in the language. Requiring a use-case is by far not enough. <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Aug/0002.html>
Received on Monday, 6 August 2007 17:38:15 UTC