Re: HTML is a declarative mark-up language

Jirka Kosek 2009-01-29 09.37:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>>> If I ask a simple question, like:
>>>
>>>    what does the name attribute on the "a" (anchor) element mean?
>> The answer to this question is "nothing, this element is non-compliant in 
>> HTML5". In fact, that's exactly the answer you found, it seems.
> 
> Just small side note. I think it would help if each element will contain
> not only list of "Element-specific attributes" but also list or link to
> global attributes available on all elements. The current editorial style
> prevents using spec as a reference guide -- and in fact that way Roy
> will quickly find that name attribute is not present on <a> in HTML5.

Your note is indeed small. But it is not exactly a side note or 
unimportant. But it is tempting to think that HTML 5 would need 
much more than a a little change in the "current editorial style" 
in order to get the features you suggest. However, every step in 
this direction would be welcome.

HTML 4 has an overview of all the elements [1], where the 
description of each element makes it clear *why* each element has 
the name it has. As well as a similar table over all the 
attributes [2]. Those two pages are probably the best starting 
pages for to read HTML 4 ...

I guess that HTML 5  could benefitted from similar pages.

[1] http://w3.org/TR/html401/index/elements
[2] http://w3.org/TR/html401/index/attributes
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 10:18:00 UTC