Re: 'role' should be property

Mark Birbeck wrote:

> Semantics are often defined with 'rules', so applying a different set
> of rules and ending up with different semantics is no big deal at all.
> The mistake that is consistently made in these discussions is to
> imagine that an HTML document is only one or two 'layers' deep, when
> actually there can be a number of different levels of semantics.

Could you elaborate, with an example perhaps?

> Also, CSS is essentially two pieces; one is a mechanism that
> dynamically sets values of properties based on rules, and the second
> is a set of properties with specific meanings. The latter are
> generally presentational at the moment, but there is no reason that
> the first part--the property setting mechanism--couldn't be factored
> out at some point in the future, to provide a generic way to set
> properties.

But then I'd suggest creating a new language, with the same mechanism, 
rather than hijacking CSS.

> And there is also no reason that some non-presentational
> properties couldn't be defined.

Then the name Cascading Style Sheets wouldn't be descriptive of the 
actual language anymore, no?

>> Therefore a role CSS property would violate the
>> architecture of CSS and the goal of separating semantics and
>> presentation, even more so than presentational HTML elements.
> 
> You're really stretching things, here.

Saying that CSS could also be used for things that do not concern 
presentation is stretching the original definition of "mechanism for 
adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents", or at the 
very least stretching what "style" is (along the same way that I believe 
XBL's "binding through CSS" idea stretches it).

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 01:02:16 UTC