Re: 'role' should be property

On May 23, 2007, at 6:12 AM, Mark Birbeck wrote:

>
> Hi Dmitri,
>
>> I am pretty sure the whole thing is a horrible idea. Not only the
>> separation of concerns is compromised, but think about it: in  
>> order to
>> understand semantics of an HTML document, you'll also need to parse
>> the stylesheet. Now you're doubling the effort for non-browser user
>> agents. Semantics should stay in the markup and certainly not require
>> additional documents to parse in order to understand the meaning of
>> the document.
>
> Mmm...this doesn't sound like a discussion about software development
> to me; something is a "horrible idea"? That means nothing. Some
> software has to parse two things instead of one? Big deal...computers
> spend most of their time doing nothing anyway. (Unless you count
> sitting in a loop waiting for something to do as doing something.)
> "Semantics should stay in the mark-up"? Which book of rules was that
> handed down from? Semantics *about* documents, that are not themselves
> contained within documents make up an enormous part of the web.

The problem with the idea is that it goes against the Architecture of  
the World Wide Web. In particular it seems to go against 4.3.  
Separation of Content, Presentation, and Interaction <http:// 
www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#pci>. "Some data formats are designed to  
describe presentation... these data formats should only address  
presentation issues."


> I'm not saying my idea is 'right' and there should be no debate. What
> I'm saying is that if people want to debate issues like this, it is
> important to get beyond simple assertions, that usually only reflect
> what their proponent is familiar and comfortable with.

I'm not going to claim the TAG is automatically right about  
everything they have ever said. But I think this particular finding  
is widely shared, at least to the extent that styling languages  
should be considered primarily presentational. It may be that  
discarding this principle would have some value, but it would  
certainly be a big deal, not something at the level of a trivial  
syntactic change.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 19:25:24 UTC