- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:35:50 +0000
Simon Pieters wrote: > Do UAs need to know the scope of the <address>? What could they do > with this information? (If it is important, then we could use a class name > or a new attribute for this IMHO.) Using <address> in this way has been difficult since it's hard for agents to infer document structure from current tag soup (I'm currently grappling with the mess in my Hypertextuality extension where I'm trying to find the relevant permalink for articles and posts). With it's heading parsing rules and <article> element, (X)HTML5 should at least make this easier for documents explicitly authored to its specification. That there should be a way of expressing the scope of contact information is more important than the more technical question of whether it's in an attribute or element or registered class name. Obviously specifying an element or attribute is preferable, as then UAs would be substantially more likely to do something with it. > <address> has been around forever. Yet no UA has done anything useful with > its semantics as far as I know. That suggests to me that the use-case is > not a real-world one. I tend to think the relationship between "real-world" utility and HTML elements is mostly the other way round. Elements become widely useful because user agents happen to make use of them (or, more often, invent them in the first place, q.v. canvas); agent developers don't necessarily recognize the utility of new elements in external specifications, however. In fact, individual developers are often entirely unaware of their very existence. > Isn't it better to make <address> more general so that its semantics > is more like how most authors use it so that it becomes a convenient > styling hook for authors? [snip] > I don't think it's a good idea to invent a new element when the use-case > is so weak that most authors don't bother using it and no UA have > implemented anything useful with it. I'd rather drop <address> altogether. I don't follow. You seem to be asserting both that "most authors" misuse <address> to mean any contact info /and/ that "most authors" have no use for an element like <contactinfo> that is actually for "any contact info". With regards to the practical utility of <address>, I think this is bound up with the whole matter of the web's highly immature techniques and technologies of citation. The age of print took a while to sought out it's techniques and technologies too. The fact that it took such time does not mean that there was no use-case for citation. An <author> element might kill several of these birds with one stone. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Tuesday, 27 February 2007 10:35:50 UTC