Re: ISSUE-53: mediatypereg - suggest closing on 2009-09-03

On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> 
> Perhaps you would prefer secondary-effect?  What I was referring to in 
> this case are the URL decomposition attributes of the DOM.
> 
> For example, in <a>:
> 
>    The DOM attribute relList must reflect the rel content attribute.
> 
>    The a element also supports the complement of URL decomposition
>    attributes, protocol, host, port, hostname, pathname, search, and
>    hash. These must follow the rules given for URL decomposition
>    attributes, with the input being the result of resolving the
>    element's href attribute relative to the element, if there is
>    such an attribute and resolving it is successful, or the empty
>    string otherwise; and the common setter action being the same as
>    setting the element's href attribute to the new output value.
>
> This is a good idea, though I would specify such attributes as null if 
> the entire component is missing, empty string if the component is 
> present-but-empty, and a filled string if it is present and filled. This 
> is explained in RFC 3968 section on parsing references.
> 
> However, the above is also specified in a way that is hopeless to 
> understand unless you already know that we are talking exclusively about 
> the "a" node in a DOM and its artificial children that are instance 
> variables for that node.

The term "URL decomposition attributes" is clearly talking about DOM 
attributes (it has an IDL block). I agree that the spec might not be 
completely clear to someone who is unfamiliar with Web technologies like 
the DOM, Web IDL, and so on, but I don't really want to have to hand-hold 
readers through unfamiliar topics, or the spec would balloon in size.


> Instead, the spec refers to both DOM nodes and mark-up as "elements" and 
> both instance variables and real mark-up attributes as "attributes".

Not sure what you mean by "instance variables".

The intro section explicitly calls out the difference between DOM 
attributes and content attributes.

DOM Element nodes and markup elements are in fact the same thing, that's 
the whole point of defining HTML as an abstract language.


> The reader also has to follow the links to section 6.12.1 in order to 
> find the attribute definitions.  Has anyone tried to read this document 
> in printed form?

The HTML5 spec is not intended to be printed (that would be a huge waste 
of paper). It's a hypertext document and makes extensive use of hypertext 
to convey its message.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 19:02:53 UTC