Re: Comments on XHTML 2.0 Working Draft

Hello Chris, everyone,

> XHTML 2.0 Working Draft Comments
> ================================
Brilliant comments!

I make bold to add some more remarks:

8.1. The abbr element and 8.2. The acronym element
---------------------     ------------------------
Can someone explain me why there are still two elements for the same
purpose? As Steven Pemberton once mentioned 'There is a long dull
discussion on what is an acronym and what not'. Was there one?

First of all, the descriptions for both elements remain somewhat
ambiguous and unclear. Secondly, I hope that the sentence 'When
necessary, authors should use style sheets to specify the
pronunciation of an abbreviated form.' will be continued in the next
WD; as I see it, 'acronym' could be safely dropped, authors
who wish to set the exact pronunciation of a certain
abbreviation/acronym can use CSS with the speak property on 'abbr'
elements. Consider the following (derived from [1]):

'speak'
Value: normal | none | spell-out | inherit
Initial: normal
Applies to: all elements
Inherited: yes
Percentages: N/A
Media: aural

This is enough to satisfy most current needs. If it's not, yet to be
published CSS3 Aural WD could contain an additional 'attr(x)' value
for the 'speak' property to let the aural UAs render the contents of
the specific attribute (title, in this case). OR, authors may wish to
add the following to their stylesheets:
abbr:after {
    content: " (" attr(title) ")";
    display: none;
    speak: normal;
}

What's wrong with this?

8.5. The br element
-------------------
I agree with Jonas here. What's the purpose of having a deprecated
element in a document explicitly marked as backwards-incompatible?

8.16. The quote element
----------------------
Why the q element has been renamed to quote? I hope these are not just
pure aesthetic reasons ((C) Chris).

By the way, the example uses the 'lang' attribute which I though was
removed in XHTML 1.1 [2] already.

17.1. The hr element
--------------------
While it's clearly explained why the 'sub' and 'sup' elements are left
in the spec, no reason provided for the 'hr' element. I doubt there
are languages using horizontal rule, and since HTML 2.0 [3] I haven't seen
any intelligible explanations. I kindly ask you to provide
reasoning for keeping 'hr'.

G. Acknowledgements
-------------------
'This section will be updated at publication time.'
Sounds promising. No doubt you should have dedicated more time to the
XHTML 2.0 draft. But that's just my opinion.

Anyway, great work!

Links: [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2-19980512/aural.html#propdef-speak
       [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml11-20010531/changes.html#a_changes
       [3] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt
       
Regards,
---
  Alexander "Croll" Savenkov         http://www.thecroll.com/
  w3@hotbox.ru                            http://croll.da.ru/

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2002 15:59:00 UTC