Re: Comments on XHTML 2.0 Working Draft

I haven't really had enough time to go over the draft as I should,
but this discussion seems to be going very fast.

I would like to see short names, i.e., one, two, and usually also
three letters, reserved for user convenience "short references" (which
do not presently exist except with specialized markup interfaces).

For that reason <strong> would be better than <b>.

I'd like to point out that in LaTeX <emph> (parallel to <em> in HTML)
is of order 2 in the sense that its occurence within itself puts
rendering back to normal -- a good thing.  This is not the case for
bold.

<hr/> and <br/> are useful empties, but they should have longer names.

<lt/>, <gt/>, and <amp/> would be somewhat handier under transforms
than &lt; , &gt; , and &amp; .  A limited number of other empties
would be handy, e.g., <dollar/> and <euro/>.  Such empties are then
allowed to live parallel to #PCDATA in content models, i.e.,

    <!ENTITY % charstuff "#PCDATA|ltc|gtc|amp|dollar|euro">,

and, of course, use of the character entities would not be precluded.

For <section> I suggest a level or depth attribute that should default
to a value based on nesting.  Yes, its first subelement should be its
header, but that does not mean that free-standing headers (with
different names) should be excluded.

I'd vote to keep HTML-style <div> for things that don't quite fit the
section paradigm.

Indeed lists should be allowed in paragraphs although they should
also be allowed to live parallel to paragraphs.

The issue about paragraph nesting should be handled by allowing list
items to have paragraphs rather than by allowing paragraphs to have
paragraphs as children.

Question:  Have the major user-agent authors agreed to provide native
recognition of the names in XHTML 2.0?  (This seems not to be the case
with XHTML 1.0, but note David Carlisle's clever XSLT sheets that make
it possible for three big guys and Amaya to live together with
XHTML+MathML, http://www.w3.org/Math/XSL/.)

                                    -- Bill

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 09:26:45 UTC