[whatwg] rel/rev for <form> ?

Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 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.

While it's true that the UA does not understand the author's semantics,
the second example is better coding because it separates content and
style. To draw an analogy, if/else/while are all transformed to goto
statement during compilation but writing if/else/while is nonetheless
better C programming practice than writing gotos.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2005 11:35:39 UTC