ACTION 162

Hi there,

OK so I was asked to look into ACTION 162 "review the definition of 
element as it relates to HTML vs. FLash (was: at breaking up 
\"element\", \"element type\")".

So, looking at or definition for element related things:

element, element type
     This document uses the terms "element" and "element type" primarily 
in the sense employed by the XML 1.0 specification ([XML], section 3): 
an element type is a syntactic construct of a document type definition 
(DTD) for its application. This sense is also relevant to structures 
defined by XML schemas. The document also uses the term "element" more 
generally to mean a type of content (such as video or sound) or a 
logical construct (such as a header or list).

WCAG doesn't mention element as a glossary item and HTML5 mentions that 
there are five different kinds of elements: void elements, raw text 
elements, RCDATA elements, foreign elements, and normal elements:

Void elements can't have any contents (since there's no end tag, no 
content can be put between the start tag and the end tag).

Raw text elements can have text, though it has restrictions described below.

RCDATA elements can have text and character references, but the text 
must not contain an ambiguous ampersand. There are also further 
restrictions described below.

Foreign elements whose start tag is marked as self-closing can't have 
any contents (since, again, as there's no end tag, no content can be put 
between the start tag and the end tag). Foreign elements whose start tag 
is not marked as self-closing can have text, character references, CDATA 
sections, other elements, and comments, but the text must not contain 
the character U+003C LESS-THAN SIGN (<) or an ambiguous ampersand.

Normal elements can have text, character references, other elements, and 
comments, but the text must not contain the character U+003C LESS-THAN 
SIGN (<) or an ambiguous ampersand. Some normal elements also have yet 
more restrictions on what content they are allowed to hold, beyond the 
restrictions imposed by the content model and those described in this 
paragraph. Those restrictions are described below.

In addition, the term 'DOM nodes' is pretty heavily used.

And the Adobe Flash Spec calls structural elements (like nodes) - Tags

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/pdf/swf_file_format_spec_v10.pdf

============

So I think we are OK with this definition however I think we may want to 
add something about DOM nodes and I think we may want to make a 
distinction between types of content (such as video or sound) - which 
will launch a browser helper application (out of the browser)  as 
opposed to embedded content which will launch an embedded player.

Cheers
Si.

=======================

Simon Harper
University of Manchester (UK)

Human Centred Web Lab: http://hcw.cs.manchester.ac.uk

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Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 17:27:59 UTC