- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 10:37:55 +0000 (UTC)
On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 html at nczonline.net wrote: > > I've just finished taking a look at the working draft of HTML 5 and > thought I'd share my thoughts. Clearly, HTML 5 is meant as an evolution > of HTML 4, which has both its good and bad points. Accordingly, there > are both good and bad parts of the specification. My thoughts are as > follows: (I've omitted replies to some parts of your e-mail. I have saved your e-mail for further replies to those sections later.) > * I understand the concept of the <dialog/> element but it's named > completely wrong. The point is to markup a conversation between two or > more parties. The problem is that the word "dialog", when in used in > user interfaces, refers to small windows that can be interacted with. > When I first read about this element, I assumed it was a way to indicate > that part of the page is a dialog window outside of the normal flow of > the document (which I thought was cool). After reading the rest, I was > disappointed to find out that wasn't the intent. I'd rename this element > as <conversation/> or <discussion/> to avoid such misunderstandings. I agree that the name is suboptimal but those names are worse (they're too long, and they're overly specific). I'm not sure what to do about this. > * The <dfn/> is another that stresses the understanding of > grammatical structure for web developers. The intent is to designate the > defining instance of a term, abberviation, or acronym. Does that make > sense to you? If it did, give yourself one point; if it didn't, don't > feel bad, most people won't get it. Again, any element that leaves > people scratching their heads probably isn't necessary or useful. <dfn> doesn't have to be used, but for certain cases it's very useful. I don't think it's a problem to keep it. > * Speaking of confusing, I've read the section about the <meter/> > element five times now and still have no idea what it's used for. I don't know how to improve the current text. Does the example showing the newsgroups activity help at all? The real reason for <meter> is that we need to make sure people don't abuse <progress> just to show gauges (e.g. disk space usage). Does that make sense? How should we go about better describing this? > * I'd like to see some treatment of rich text input controls. Right > now we all use a hack (an iframe in design mode) that has to be copied > over into a form field to be submitted. It would be nice to have this > handled natively and have reliable HTML formatting of that content > (instead of the per-browser implementations we have now). > > Also "contenteditable" doesn't solve my issue with rich text editing. It > solves the ability to do it, but not a straightforward way to do it in > the context of a form and submit it back to the server without some > intermediary code. My point is that there should be a way to submit rich > text in a form by default, without needing to write extra JavaScript > code. The problem is that while everyone seems to want a rich text control, nobody seems to agree on exactly what it should allow. Thus contenteditable, and the ability for people to roll their own. > * I'd like to see a common attribute that can be used on any element > to indicate information related to the element. I'm tired of fighting > the custom attribute battle. The fact is that it's a very common need to > include extra data related to an element. I'd propose a "reldata" > attribute (short for "related data") be considered as an optional > attribute on all elements. We then, as developers, could use that > attribute as we see fit and the document would still validate (for > people who care about such things). We recently added data-*="", does that help? http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#data- Cheers, -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2008 03:37:55 UTC