Re: Making all elements and attributes that contain hyphens valid

On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 17:18:46 +0200, Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:

> Naturally, it would be useful to advise such third parties that they  
> would be better off getting any generally useful such attribute  
> standardised.

Yes. This is the best approach.

The spec already allows this. It allows "applicable specifications" to  
extend HTML. So the epub community could write a spec for the whatever=""  
attribute. They could also come to the WHATWG or HTML WG table and propose  
their extension -- even if it gets rejected for HTML proper, the  
discussion might reveal design problems with the proposal that the  
community can fix in their own applicable specification.

> But it provides a valuable escape hatch for when there is no agreement  
> to introduce such features into HTML. Right now the alternatives are:
>
>      1) Use namespaces; bad idea, forces XHTML.
>      2) Use data-$prefix-*; bad idea, not meant for that.

Not the only options, see above.

> The impact on user agents is zero, only validators are impacted.
>
> Thoughts?

I don't think we should allow arbitrary attributes if they have dashes.  
AFAICT it would make validators less useful at catching mistakes while not  
really solving the stated problem. Validators should actually *validate*  
the whatever="" attribute, not punch a huge anything-goes hole in all of  
HTML.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 20 September 2013 08:25:32 UTC