- From: <JOrendorff@ixl.com>
- Date: Sun, 24 Oct 1999 17:50:14 -0400
- To: www-html@w3.org
Well, that was a short thread. I guess the concensus is that HTML is stable. Naturally, I disagree. :-) With XML, XSL, and schemas we'll all be able to invent our own tags, which is great, but what I'm *not* hearing (and this worries me) is that it's much better to use a tag that's got standard semantics than to invent your own tag for the same thing. I'm all for extensibility, but maintaining extensions can be expensive. I currently write <book-title> in XML documents and use XT to translate them into transitional HTML 4. That's expensive, in my opinion. In the future, maybe I'll be able to write a whole super-stylesheet for <book-title> so that the browser will automatically check to see if the book is on sale on Amazon or bn.com, or available as e-text from the Gutenburg Project, and then offer those options to the user through clever context menus or something. That will be wonderful. But still awfully expensive for me as an author. I'd be happier if there were a good standard set of tags I could use, and the browser would do the work of figuring out whether or not the extra semantic info I've provided is useful. I look at the set of tags that exist in HTML and they seem pretty randomly chosen. There should be a core set of tags for the most common semantic distinctions that need to be made. On top of that, I should be free invent my own when necessary. If no one else ever needed to express the name of a book on the web, I would be fine with using <span class="booktitle"> and CSS for the presentation. Then it would be my problem. But lots of people use book titles. Why no standard? -- Jason
Received on Sunday, 24 October 1999 17:50:55 UTC