- From: Oli Studholme <whatwg.org@boblet.net>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:38:09 +0900
Hi Bjartur, On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Bjartur Thorlacius <svartman95 at gmail.com> wrote: > ?ann ?ri 12.j?l 2011 09:15, skrifa?i Oli Studholme: > Datetimes will usually be presented in a localized format to humans. I think at most user agents will offer users the option to localise datetime attributes. I don?t think such localisation would be the default. This is because even in one localisation there are multiple ways to present dates, and automatically changing a short date form to a long localised date form may break layout (which user agents avoid wherever possible). >> How would the user agent >> know which way the author wants to present attribution? >> > By fetching and reading a linked stylesheet. I think it's easier to style > attributes then text nodes polluted with delimiters such as "from" and "by" > that make reordering hard. This is an interesting idea. However I think this would be a large increase in complexity (code & l10n) for user agents, and for little gain. If the user agent was also translating the content then this might be considered, but merely styling block quote attribution this way would involve many options per language (depending on what attributes were present and what data they displayed). There are a *lot* of potential attributes just for citation. http://microformats.org/wiki/citation lists 22. Even providing for all of these will still exclude other potential block quote-related information, such as notes, copyright etc > More importantly, how is the author to know how the user wants attribution > presented? Heh. Generally users are happy with the author?s content as long as they can read it. I think there?d be few people in the world that would care enough to add user styles to change e.g. from a bibliographic to an author-date system citation. For more than this you may need to wait for the semantic web ;) >> Again I have no idea how a user agent would follow these rules. >> Arbitrarily showing one thing in one viewport size and something else >> at a different size would be a bug (arbitrarily meaning without >> author/user intervention, such as via CSS). > > A feature to one, a bug to another. The existence of the CSS height and > width media features suggests that catering style to varying viewport sizes > is desired by others than just me. I don't see why a user agent should seek > an authors' permission to style a document for an unusually sized viewport, > nor require users to write their own stylesheets instead of shipping > customizable stylesheets. However you?re advocating the user agent follow these rules without author/user intervention. The reason that adaptive layout isn?t done by default by user agents (with some notable exceptions in mobile) is that it has the potential to break things, in such a way that neither the author or user can fix. > For a lack of a valid URI identifying myself, I used an unregistered > uri-scheme ("kennitala") and my national ID as the scheme-specific part. The > exact URI in question is unimportant to the example, but I see no reason to > restrict values of cite to locators only, as opposed to identifiers in > general. Quoting books identified by ISBN numbers seems like a good enough > use case to me. But what would a user agent do with an ISBN number? if there?s a URL at least the user agent can theoretically present a link, like how the cite attribute is supposed to work. I also just realised you used this in your footer example for an href. This would present text styled as a link that doesn?t respond to clicks, a usability problem. >> This proves Jeremy's earlier point about attributes being a bad place >> to store data. Unless you look at the source you?d never notice these >> mistakes. >> > Sure I would, had I actually tried to, say, render them or validate before > posting them on the Internet. I refrained from doing so as I knew this to be > invalid markup, anyway. Where datetime to be a valid attribute of blockquote You are assuming the rest of the internet?s authors are as conscientious as you are :/ humans are very adept at making mistakes. hidden data makes mistakes in this data far harder to identify and correct > No, that would be quite an odd rendering. More likely renderings: > > ?ann annan apr?l 1997 skrifa?i Bjartur Thorlacius: >> Lorem ipsum > > > On the second April, 1997 Bjartur Thorlacius wrote: >> Lorem ipsum > > ? Lorem ipsum > ? ? ? ?? Bjartur Thorlacius > > It all depends on the user's localized stylesheet. this requires the user agent to localise the attributes before displaying them. what about for languages which aren?t localised in the user?s stylesheet? >> There?s also the possibility of adding another inline element, such as >> <credit>, which could let someone credit an author of a quote, or e.g. >> to credit a photographer of an image together<figure> ?and >> <figcaption>. >> > So <credit> would be an inline version of <footer>, to be contained in <q>? > Would it not be more consistent to use attributes, in that case? Note that > <figcaption> may contain <footer>s. I?m not sure on the earlier discussion about <credit>, and actually it?s only my assumption that it?d be inline. I?m not even sure if it would contain all credited information (including perhaps copyright data), or just the creator?s name. Hopefully someone will weigh in on this? >> While something like<a> ?and<cite> ?in a<footer> ?could work for >> citation, I still don?t have a good idea about citing explicitly when >> the citation is inline (on the last line of the block quote), or for >> <q>. >> > I do: use the same attributes as for <blockquote>. > Referencing people as works as I did in my examples is probably > bad (read: terrible) style. There should be a sepearate @author attribute > for attributing an author, distinct from the @cite attribute for citing the > work. what about for notes on a blockquote, such as ?emphasis mine?? you?d need another attribute. what about for when you?d like to contain HTML, such as ?<em>emphasis</em> mine?? attributes prevent this use case. > On a third thought, using a <footer> child of <blockquote> doesn't seem so > confusing after all, but it'd be even less confusing to HTML newcomers were > it named e.g. <credit>. But then it would not be an appropriate element for > "fat footers", whatever they are. I don't see what citations and "fat > footers" have in common. in graphic design a footer contains supplementary information about the content it follows. the spec initially disallowed ?fat footers?, but the naming and common usage would have led to people using them for fat footers regardless of the spec. they still contain supplementary information about their sectioning element or sectioning root. This semantic connection seems stronger to me than one based on arbitrary size peace - oli studholme
Received on Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:38:09 UTC