RE: How about a <notice>element?

Concerning worries on where to draw the line on extensions to XHTML,
Jonas Jørgensen wrote:
<<< That's not an easy question. But I still think that warning and
notice 
would be useful additions. And I don't really see the advantage of being

able to mark up abstracts, summaries and conclusions. >>>

Speaking as someone who puts a lot of short articles and papers online,
I can actually see a lot of very useful applications for <abstract> or
<summary>. In particular, searching through a long list of academic
papers by abstract is a very common research task. Similarly, readers
who keep up with a lot of online news will often want to scan summaries
of articles in order to find something to read, and a lot of newsletters
that I get are basically just big aggregations of short summaries
together with links. Search engines and other aggregator applications
could make very good use of this semantic markup. Since abstracts are
also a very common feature of academic papers, and summaries often head
up the author may very well wish to style the abstract in a particular
way.

However, intuitively, it seems to me that rather than creating all new
tags, this would be better done through the <section> tag and the
class="..." attribute.

Q. Since the W3C has in the past created canonical values for certain
attributes (e.g., recommended meanings for various rel="..." values),
would it be a good idea to create some canonical classes of <section>
for the purposes of aggregators and document authors? For example:

<section class="abstract">: Document abstract or summary
<section class="text">: Body of document text
<section class="notes">: Endnotes to document

And so on. I assume there would be similarly useful classes for
applications other than marking up large amounts of written text. What
do y'all think?

-C

Received on Monday, 12 August 2002 16:13:42 UTC