Re: data-* attributes [was: Re: ISSUE-41/ACTION-97 decentralized-extensibility]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course I won't withdraw my opinion.

Then do you at least admit that it's currently merely an opinion,
unsupported by any data?

> I don't believe that jQuery's use of the data-* attributes will
> provide a solution for data that needs to be aggregated outside of the
> page. It can't because that's a violation of the HTML5 specification
> rules for data-*. However...

Hm?  I'm not quite sure how we arrived here.  I don't think anybody
was talking about this, were they?  I used jQuery as an example of how
self-policed namespacing can work.  Nobody ever suggested anything
about using data-* for data that needs to be aggregated outside of the
page (as you say, that's against the HTML5 spec).  So this paragraph
seems like it came out of left field.

> I'm sorry if you took offense at my suggestion for you to write up a
> proposal for data-* for decentralized extensibility. I just felt that
> we could be going around in circles indefinitely on this topic,
> exchanging opinions, disagreeing with each other, without a concrete
> proposal.

Oh, no offense taken, don't worry.  I just have no idea why you
suggested it in the first place, as nobody ever suggested data-* would
be used for anything of the sort.  This thread was solely about
addressing a confusion concerning when it was appropriate to use
data-* attributes.  Reading back, the first mention of "decentralized
extensibility" was by you, in your first post on this thread.

> A concrete proposal would then give us focal points on which to have
> further discussion. Like the beginning proposal that Tony provided.

But there's no need for such a proposal, since nobody had ever
suggested that data-* would be appropriate for such a thing.  You were
the first to mention "decentralized extensibility" in the context of
this discussion, and you did so solely to state that data-* was not
appropriate for implementing such.  I don't disagree, as long as we're
clear that we're talking about implementing "decentralized
extensibility" in the general case, where you may have, for example,
crawlers reading pages and extracting information.

In the specific case of allowing js widgets in a page to hold their
own custom state for their own purposes, data-* is of course
appropriate - that's what it was designed for.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 19 October 2009 20:38:10 UTC