- From: Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>
- Date: Sat, 05 May 2007 11:04:09 +0100
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: [...] > The purpose of the "role" attribute is addressed in HTML5 by the "class" > attribute, along with predefined classes. [...] > I don't understand how the "role" > attribute does anything that "class" can't do. Once again, I think these statements indicate the profound differences between the beliefs of the founder WHATWG members and of some of us who have more recently started to contribute to this debate. "Class", in classic HTML, has no pre-defined semantics (or, more precisely, no value of "class" has pre-defined semantics), and thus there is a large corpus of classic HTML documents in the wild that use all conceivable values of "class", /including/ those which the WHATWG seek to reserve. "Role", on the other hand, simply does not exist in classic HTML, and thus if the WHATWG were to reserve some (and perhaps all) possible values for "role", this could have no effect whatsoever on legacy documents. Thus I for one believe that if the WHATWG perceive value in reserving some half-dozen class names, they would be better advised to reserve some or all role names instead, so as to avoid any possible conflict with the semantics of extant documents. Philip Taylor
Received on Saturday, 5 May 2007 10:04:14 UTC