Re: 'role' should be property

On 6/4/07, Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net> wrote:

>    Explain this to me: How does performing the same action in a new
> language in a document separate from your original source document make
> it easier to do a task than simply revising the language of the original
> source document? Exactly where are the repetitive semantics that justify
> a separate CSS-like language in the first place, and how does one bind
> to the HTML elements in question without generating markup for binding
> that would be roughly equivalent to the amount of markup created with
> |role| or |class|? After all, |scope| and |header|, when they need to be
> declared, often apply to a relatively small percentage of the elements
> in an HTML document.


The example I came up with earlier would be a page with 20 or more hcalendar
events, or something with a syntax as complicated as they are. Each event
needs as many as eight classes to specify the data, and most of those
classes have rediculous names. That could be 160 classes. They could be
replaced with one class on the root element of the event, or maybe even just
a single class on the container of all events. If additional classes were
needed, the users could choose their own, rather than using silly things
like "dtstamp" and "uid". I know what they mean after examining the spec,
but could you expect anyone else to guess what they mean?