Re: 'role' should be property

I really like this idea, though I am not sure what would go into
"rolesheets".  This does open up the option of including industry or topic
specific "standard" rolesheets.  (First thought was they could be Lisp code
... pretend I didn't say that.)


On 5/27/07, Dannii <curiousdannii@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> A <roles> element or a <link rel="rolesheet"> seems to me to be a better
> idea. It would allow you to specify the default roles of various elements
> and collections of elements, rather than repeating that information a
> hundred times or more (depending on your page it could be this many). And
> you could use any class or ID to specify them, removing any issues with
> defined class names. An individual element's role attribute could be used to
> override the default roles.
>
> People have said that having external rolesheets is a bad idea, but isn't
> this what we already have, except that instead of having them on your site,
> they're internal to the user-agent  and based of the HTML spec? User-agents
> will already have some sort of system to understand the semantics of a page,
> they could then augment that on a per-page basis based on the rolesheet,
> rather than based on individual elements' role attributes.
>