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

Jonas Sicking schrieb:
> Dão Gottwald wrote:
>>
>> Jonas Sicking schrieb:
>>>
>>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>> On May 4, 2007, at 9:30 AM, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote:
>>>>> One of the most exciting (to me) developments in the XHTML camp is the
>>>>> emergence of the ROLE attribute - as it now provides a means of 
>>>>> "explaining"
>>>>> what something is or does... To quote the W3C spec:
>>>>> "The role attribute takes as its value one or more white-space 
>>>>> separated
>>>>> QNames. The attribute describes the role(s) the current element 
>>>>> plays in the
>>>>> context of the document. <snip> It could also be used as a 
>>>>> mechanism for
>>>>> annotating portions of a document in a domain specific way (e.g., a 
>>>>> legal
>>>>> term taxonomy)."
>>>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/#s_role_module_attributes
>>>>
>>>> The purpose of the "role" attribute is addressed in HTML5 by the 
>>>> "class" attribute, along with predefined classes.
>>>
>>> Personally I think this was a very poor decision. The problem is that 
>>> you have user names and standard names mixed in the same namespace. 
>>> So there's a big risk that the user accidentally ends up marking 
>>> semantic meaning to their elements simply by wanting to style them.
>>
>> Umm. You consider enriching the semantics of markup "by accident" a 
>> bug, not a feature? Even if the author added class="copyright" for 
>> styling purposes, what's the problem with telling the user agent and 
>> thereby the user that there's copyright information?
> 
> It's fine if it happens to be the right semantic, sure. But it's very 
> likely that they'll add that to elements that has an entierly different 
> meaning, thereby adding the wrong semantic to it.

You're sure that it would be "very likely"? My assumption is that the 
hits would outnumber the false positives by far. "role", on the other 
hand, would probably only be used by authors that care about semantics 
and accessibility.

--Dao

Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 06:45:09 UTC