Re: [heycam/webidl] No seemingly consistent Shepherd story (#240)

Adding @tabatkins's comments on irc here below:

> The distinction y'all are looking for is the notion of "kinds" from type theory. Values are the lowest kind, types are the next highest (they can be instantiated to produce a value), and type constructors are the next highest after that (they can be instantiated to produce a type).  The kind hierarchy is infinite, of course.
> If values are kind 1, types are kind 2, etc, then "dictionary" or "record" are kind-3 things.
> The IDL definitions types in Bikeshed are meant to capture kind-2 things.  There's nothing official for kind-3, because there's no call for it, so they instead fall into the generic "dfn" bucket.
> Then you've also got the kind-2 things like "sequence<DOMString>". They're definitely kind-2, types, because when they're instantiated they produce values (an array of strings, in this case).
> They're just *anonymous* types, which aren't handled by the Bikeshed linking model. As far as I can tell, you don't really need it, either.  You instead want to link to "sequence" (the kind-3 thing) and "DOMString" (the kind-2 thing).  If you use typedef to give a name to it, tho, like "typedef sequence<DOMString> NameList;", then "NameList" is a kind-2 thing, a type, with a name that can be referred with Bikeshed's linking model.

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