Re: The "request for an element" nonsense...

On Tuesday, August 13, 2002, at 02:38 , kelvSYC wrote:

> Maybe it seems redundant (maybe even stupid), but should there be 
> some sort
> of informative document about how to import your own tags in XHTML 
> so that
> these "request for an element" is unnecessary?

Being able to import one's own tags is no more useful that being able 
to say <div class="foo"> for the purpose of publishing on the Web.

The whole point of defining new elements and their semantics in the 
normative W3C spec is to make the semantics known to software 
implementors at large so that software can be programmed to handle 
the elements usefully (eg. by providing a reasonable default 
presentation if the program presents XHTML 2.0). Being able to style 
one's own elements in a user agent that supports CSS is not good 
enough, because
  * it wouldn't work with lightweight clients that don't support CSS
  * the meaning of the element would be unknown to software that tries 
to analyze
    the role of different parts of the document eg. for search relevance
  * it would require authors to provide styling for all different CSS 
media and typical
    authors are not competent for providing style for all different 
possible media

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/

Received on Wednesday, 21 August 2002 13:02:20 UTC