Re: Conformance of DL Groups Missing DT or DD

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> 
> There are only 4 prose elements, according to HTML 5 section 3.9:
> 
>    3.9 Prose.
>    3.9.1 The p element.
>    3.9.2 The hr element.
>    3.9.3 The br element.
>    3.9.4 The dialog element.

Hm, that's an unintentional confusion. I've tried to fix this.


> FIRSTLY: It seems you, throughout, are mistaking 'prose' for the 'prose 
> content' cathegory of HTML elements. Olaf's subject, however, was 
> 'prose' versus 'poetry'.
>
> SECONDLY: Focusing at Olaf's subject, I claim that the 'Prose' section 
> contains elements for the "prose use case", in the narrowest meaning of 
> that word.

Ah. I see. I have attempted to fix that confusion by removing the word 
"prose" from that section title and merging some of the sections around 
there together.


>     1) Constrained rules for the <dl>, which fails to take into account the
> real world use of the <dl> element for poetry mark-up. See Lachlan's message
> [1]. (As mentioned by Olaf.)
>     2) Simon Pieters' message from 5th of March 2007, which you referenced and
> took note of [2], goes against the use of <dl> for poetry, when it speaks
> against "<dd>...<dd>... instead of <dd><p>...<p>".

Notwithstanding existing practice, using <dl> elements for poetry is 
blatently wrong and an abuse of the semantics of the <dl> element, both in 
HTML4, and in HTML5, even with HTML5's loosening of the rules.


> Had there been a poetry section - instead of only some poetry examples 
> here and there, then the spec would probably not have overlooked the 
> poetry usecase for <dl> and its "relaxed" use of unmatching <dt>-s and 
> <dd>-s.

Poetry is no more important than stories, addresses, legal documents, 
letters, and any number of other document types, none of which have their 
own section either.


> > If anyone has suggestions for a better term than "prose content", I'm 
> > very eager to here them. I don't like the term myself [...]
> 
> How about 'running text content'. See Wikipedia [1]. 'Running text' in 
> Dictionary.com: "the body of text in a newspaper, magazine, or the like, 
> as distinguished from the heads, illustrations, etc". Running text, 
> which is also known as 'bread (and butter) text' in German and 
> Scandinavian languages, is not directly related to the type of text - 
> but merely denotes 'the main bulk of the text'.

"Prose content" in HTML5 includes headings, illustrations, etc, so 
"running text" would be at least as bad if not worse. :-)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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Received on Wednesday, 27 February 2008 07:38:55 UTC