- From: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:09:53 +0200
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
- CC: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
Julian Reschke wrote: > ... > @data-* is only in HTML5, and the documentation makes it clear that it > has a different purpose. That being said, it has the same problem as > most of the other things you mentioned, the lack of a disambiguation > mechanism. > ... In the meantime, Lachlan Hunt wrote on the WHATWG IRC channel (<http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20080801#l-424>): > # # [23:21] <Lachy> "And authors want to add metadata. Instead of forcing it into containers that haven't been designed for it (@title, @data-*), let them do it properly." -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Aug/0023.html > # # [23:21] <Lachy> I don't get what other way would be considered the proper way to embed metadata, beyond the mechanisms designed for adding metadata?! > # # [23:23] <Lachy> if, as Julian claims, title and data-* weren't designed for adding some type of metadata, then I must be missing something. Indeed. @title is metadata, but it's not designed for non-human-readable information (so using abbr/@title to provide a machine-readable data in microformats turned out to be a problem). @data-* has been "designed" for providing additional data to scripts *within* the page, not for anything else: "Custom data attributes are intended to store custom data private to the page or application, for which there are no more appropriate attributes or elements." -- <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#custom> So if you use them for something else, such as providing semantic information to other applications (AT, crawlers, plugins...), you are abusing it, and follow the pattern I was complaining about in the first place (abusing existing elements to work around the lack of extensibility). Same for @title, btw. BR, Julian
Received on Saturday, 2 August 2008 05:10:39 UTC