Re: Research for class="copyright"

Karl Dubost schrieb:
> 
> 
> Le 7 mai 2007 à 03:22, Lachlan Hunt a écrit :
>> To me, that looks like strong evidence in favour of defining 
>> class=copyright.
>>
>>> Thank you. It was gracious of you to cite a study that actually 
>>> disproves your claim.
>>
>> I never claimed that there were no sites that misused the value.  I 
>> only asked for evidence to be supplied by those making the claims that 
>> there was misuse, which would then show whether or not the misuse was 
>> of any significance.  From this survey, the results show that the 
>> misuse is of little significance.
> 
> This thread makes me think of three issues related to standardizing 
> class names.
> 
> * misuse
>   It is difficult to solve this one, because it is
>   very rare, we understand, know the intent of the
>   author.
> 
> * language issue
>   Some class names will have different meaning in
>   different languages.
> 
> * previous use
>   This one is more problematic. When someone starts
>   to standardize a class="somevalue" without scoping
>   it with a version number or namespace or something
>   which identifies the version of the document, this
>   person hijacks the meaning of the author.
> 
> Example:
> Let's say, I use class="menu" for my restaurant Web site to mark up my 
> food menu in my pages, then later on a random group decides to 
> standardize values of class names and get supports by search engines. 
> They decided that class="menu" is a navigation menu. Later on, Browsers 
> start to implement by rendering the class="menu" in a specific way or to 
> show a widget for navigating the side triggered by the class="menu". I 
> start to receive complaints from my customers because the Web site is 
> broken and doesn't make sense any more.
> 
> The group and the support by implementers broke my Web site. [Support 
> Existing Content][1]
> 
> Standardizing class values without scoping mechanism will break the 
> content of Web sites.

My conclusion is another one: We have to be very careful when adding 
class names to the spec; it's clearly not /the/ way to extend HTML. The 
"menu" example is good and valid. "menu" is not unambiguous, so let's 
not add it (but add <nav> instead). This doesn't necessarily apply to 
"copyright", "search" and others.

--Dao

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2007 09:59:09 UTC