[whatwg] rel/rev for <form> ?

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> He meant that the class names used should not be used to describe the
> presentation, but rather describe the semantics.  It is, however, ok to
> use stylesheets to add styles based on the classes.
> 
> eg.  These are bad practice:
>   <span class="bold red-border">
>   <p class="blue-text">
>   <div class="big bold">
> 
> These are better:
>   <strong class="warning">
>   <p class="summary">
>   <h1 class="title"> (or simply <h1>)

Of course, the UA does not care about "semantic" class names. In both
cases, the UA only sees opaque strings that can be tested for equality
with strings present in CSS selectors.

The class names in the latter case may be "semantic" in the private
universe of the author, but they do not communicate semantics to
software developed by someone else without a prior agreement (possibly
in the form of a third-party spec) on the meaning of the class names.

As far as the UA goes, the "semantic" class names could be translated
into Finnish or into Elvish or be replaced with unique random strings.

So in the end, home-grown class names are just style hooks when observed
outside the private universe of the author.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2005 00:49:25 UTC