Re: proposal: subline element

2013-05-29 14:16, Steve Faulkner wrote:
> some people in the HTML community have indicated their interest in a
> feature that provides a semantic indication of  a subheading,
> subtitle, alternative title or tagline
>
> here is a feature proposal to further discussion:
>
> http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html

This is a better approach than <hgroup>, which has apparently been 
abandoned, more or less. But it's still too logical and too little 
logical at the same time.

First, "a single or multiple subheadings, subtitles, taglines or bylines 
for a |h1 
<http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html#the-h1-h2-h3-h4-h5-and-h6-elements>|, 
|h2 
<http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html#the-h1-h2-h3-h4-h5-and-h6-elements>|, 
|h3 
<http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html#the-h1-h2-h3-h4-h5-and-h6-elements>|, 
|h4 
<http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html#the-h1-h2-h3-h4-h5-and-h6-elements>|, 
|h5 
<http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html#the-h1-h2-h3-h4-h5-and-h6-elements>|, 
or |h6 
<http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html#the-h1-h2-h3-h4-h5-and-h6-elements>| 
element" isn't really a semantic definition. The words used are too 
vague, especially considering the worldwide audience we should consider, 
mostly with a native tongue other than English, often with considerable 
difficulties with uncommon English words and phrases. The formulation 
does not really say anything about the meaning of anything, in the good 
old semantic definition for "meaning". Like most "semantic" definitions, 
it just tries to describe structure. But even this is unclear here. 
"Subheading", for example, can mean many different things, ranging from 
part of a heading shown in smaller font just for practical reasons to a 
heading at a lower level of structure.

Second, the correspondence between "subheadings, subtitles, taglines or 
bylines" and heading elements would be based on the occurrence of 
elements in a sequence of elements, not on element nesting or explicit 
references via attributes.

Third, the "subheadings, subtitles, taglines or bylines" would not be 
part of the associated heading. I don't see much logic here. A typical 
subheading, in the sense intended here, is logically part of the 
heading, just less important, or maybe just rendered in a smaller font 
(it's actually very difficult to distinguish between these).

Consider the markup that we can currently use and that works on all 
browsers:

  <h1>The reality dysfunction<br>
*<small>*Space is not the only void*</small>*</h1>

It's logically all part of a single heading, which is too long to be 
rendered equally prominently. You can style it as needed, and default 
rendering, on all existing browsers, should be acceptable.

If you would like to add logic to this, e.g. so that some content "would 
not be used as a heading in an application extracting heading data and 
ignoring subheadings" (which refers to rather hypothetical software), 
then you can simply tell such software to ignore content of <small> 
elements inside heading elements.

If this sounds too illogical - since <small> could, in principle, be 
used for various purposes inside headings -, then I think the 
constructive approach would be to add an attribute, say type=..., to 
<small> elements, allowing authors to declare their reason for using 
<small>. The advantage over adding new elements is that even old legacy 
browsers can deal with <small type=sub> (they simply ignore the attribute).

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 17:35:05 UTC