Re: HTML 5 Authoring Guidelines Proposal

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:56:19 -0000, Lachlan Hunt  
<lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au> wrote:

>    I thought it would be worthwhile getting started on this and  
> presenting a proposal.  So I wrote up a brief proposal for HTML 5  
> Authoring Guidelines and checked it into CVS.  At this stage, it's very  
> rough draft and effectively just an outline of how it could be written.

I think it looks too much like the specification. Especially elements are  
introduced in the same manner: using laconic description of a few  
technical properties. That's fine for the spec, but in tutorial I'd prefer  
element properties described in prose and examples, e.g. instead of:

> Content model: Zero or more block-level elements.
> Tags Start tag: optional, [...]

rather:

> Body of document can contain only block-level elements like <h1> and  
> <p>. You don't have to put <body> tag in your document, browser will  
> insert one automatically where it's appropriate.

Another problem: not using full namespace declarations in examples may  
lead authors to believe that XML/XHTML5 has "magic" prefixes for SVG and  
XHTML. If you want to avoid repetition of namespace declarations, I  
suggest choosing a prefix that clearly doesn't look like part of the spec,  
e.g. <example-svg:circle> or <my-svg:circle> instead of <svg:circle>.

Why use quotes for all attribute values in HTML examples? AFAIK unquoted  
values are conformant and interoperable. Quotes on all attributes may  
falsely suggest that HTML has same rules as XML in this regard and that  
omitting quotes is deprecated/non-conformant (is it?).

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesinski

Received on Friday, 23 November 2007 22:39:49 UTC