- From: Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 17:25:39 +0100
- To: public-html@w3.org, www-html@w3.org
Henri Sivonen wrote: [long snip, over points of disagreement]
>> There is no reason at all why a Finn should not mark
>> up his/her document using <kappale> and <korostettu> if he/she
>> wishes
>
> Yes, there is. Real software has built-in behaviours for the
> corresponding commonly known elements (in this case <p> and <em>), so
> the commonly known elements are more useful to markup consumers. (And
> example with a homegrown <a href='...'> replacement might have been
> better, though.)
This is the very area that I'm trying to address : at the moment,
browsers understand a very restricted dialect. There is no
/technical/ reason why they should not evolve to handle
an unrestricted set of dialects, so long as there is a well-defined
method for extending a base dialect to include the additional
elements that one wishes to use. Gareth Hay asked recently
"Are you suggesting that HTML should allow tags to be written in
any language ?", and I most certainly am. There is no reason
whatsoever to require HTML to be written in any one language,
when it /could/ be written in any language providing a suitable
mechanism is defined for dynamically extending the element set.
And yes, there are bootstrapping issues here : the extensibility
mechanism would itself be written in English, but this could
then be bootstrapped into another language, allowing a web user
completely unfamiliar with the English language to express him/herself
through the medium of *IHTML ("International HTML"). Ditto CSS.
Philip Taylor
Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 16:25:57 UTC