Re: minutes for HTML WG f2f, 2011-11-04, part 1

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 09:46:08 +0100, Peter Winnberg
> <peter.winnberg@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The way I see it, only a attribute is needed to hold the
>> machine-readable data, and this attribute could perhaps be used on
>> other elements as well (time?). If something like that would be done
>> instead, and not add a new element and just an attribute, there are of
>> course other things to consider, what should that attribute be named,
>> and how can it be specified so that microdata/microformats/RDFa could
>> take advantage of it.
>
> The main problem with a global attribute is that it would make it less clear
> which attribute takes precedence and whether or not the value is resolved as
> a URL, as previously discussed. [1][2] Further, what would the global
> attribute be? value="" already exists with different semantics on <button>,
> <option>, <input>, <li>, <meter>, <progress> and <param>. content="" is not
> an option since RDFa uses it (in the early days microdata had both a
> property="" and an about="" attribute and there were objections to this).
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13240#c17
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Oct/0166.html

Indeed.  Microdata already has the problem that the value of a given
itemprop can be three different things, depending on the element and
its attributes - either the text contents (for most elements), the
contents of a particular attribute (for <a>, <meta>, etc.), or the
Microdata item rooted at that element (for elements with @itemscope on
them as well).  These currently have a minor advantage in that there's
a somewhat sensical "specificity" argument about them - the attribute
beats the specific tags beats the general tag.

Adding a fourth behavior that can apply to any element, and which
doesn't have a clear place from a specificity perspective, would be
rather confusing.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 8 November 2011 14:42:52 UTC