Re: no change proposal for ISSUE-55, but a new plan for @profile

Tab Atkins Jr., Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:32:00 -0600:
> 2010/2/20 Krzysztof Maczyński <1981km@gmail.com>:
>> @data-* is Ian's invention and he has some very specific ideas of 
>> what you're not supposed to do with them (as in MUST NOT). Of course 
>> we won't be sure until he speaks for himself but I believe the 
>> WHATWG's vision of @data-* is akin to mine (and (X)HTML's) of 
>> @class. I want to be able to exempt class names from being affected 
>> by profiles and those who prefer @data-* would likely think 
>> similarly for their case. I mean, everybody wants *some* mechanism 
>> of this kind at their disposal to be exempted or at least 
>> exemptable, right?
> 
> Yes, data-* is very specifically supposed to carry *no* semantics and
> *not* be useful outside of the page it's written on.

The spec draft says "site" 5 times. And "page" only 1-2 times. 

>  It's nothing
> more than an officially blessed way for scripts to embed data they
> need directly in the page and have a convenient method of access to
> it.

Why should it be important to be able to exempt class and/or data-* 
from profiles? If the purpose is to limit it for scripts, then _that_ 
should be said, rather limiting it otherwise. 

Btw, the spec drafts itself recommends a class name prefix in 
connection with <code>:

]] Although there is no formal way to indicate the language of computer 
code being marked up, authors who wish to mark code elements with the 
language used, e.g. so that syntax highlighting scripts can use the 
right rules, may do so by adding a class prefixed with "language-" to 
the element. [[

The spec draft also encourages script library authors to use a prefix 
which can be associated with that library, in order to avoid clashes. 
This is standardization across sites! At the same time the draft cites 
an example about how it would be inappropriate "for generic software 
not associated with that music site to search for tracks of a certain 
length by looking at" such data found in such attributes.

What is "generic software"? I suppose that www.google.com is an 
application? And I suppose that those that create statistics of how 
popular script libraries are, will not avoid looking at how many pages 
that e.g. uses data-DoQuery-*="", if that could help them creating the 
stats?

When Toby presented his profile based language idea a month back or so, 
he took an example that is not far from an example found in the spec 
draft w.r.t. data-*:

]] If a Web page wanted an element to represent a space ship, e.g. as 
part of a game, it would have to use the class attribute along with 
data-* attributes [[

Short thereafter, the draft says that:

]] Authors should carefully design such extensions so that when the 
attributes are ignored and any associated CSS dropped, the page is 
still usable. [[

This is of course great if we consider data-* as script related, 
because, after all, one should write pages that works also without 
scripts? But that too is an issue which is separate from the profile 
issue.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Sunday, 21 February 2010 07:25:50 UTC