Re: Bottom-up Sections

Jewett, Jim J wrote:
> Mikko Rantalainen
>>Stefan Ram
> 
>>>  certain "small sections" [such as theorems]
>>>  do not fit into the XHTML 2 section scheme. 
> 
>>[...]
>>sub section, but is that really the intent? Or are those 
>>"boxes" logically more analogous to diagrams and 
>>pictures or something else which is logically out of 
> 
> Yes, they are part of the section.
> Yes, they are out of flow, exactly like a diagram or picture.
> [...]
> Stefan may also be suggesting that this is a special type of
> div that should have its own name.  There, I disagree.  I
> could support several types of div (diagram, sidenote, 
> example, dialogue, definition) or I could support using
> div for all of them and looking at the class.  

How about something like this:

<section>
Blah blah blah
<section title="Example">blah blah</section>
blah blah
<section title="Figure"><object>...</object></section>
blah blaa.
</section>

The idea is to use the same element for all those sections because 
that's what they really are. I chose the title attribute because the 
requirements for this feature are not totally different from the 
requirements for linked style sheets.

Suggested usage would be to select the title attribute so that it can be 
appended a number and user agent could create table of "Figure"s 
"Example"s and so on[1]. I'm not sure if using 'title' for this causes 
problems with linking when all elements can act as links.

Default rendering could be to number sections without title and position 
all sections with title out of flow -- whatever it should mean for 
current medium.

As I see it, examples, figures and other misc stuff create interleaved 
hierarchy with normal sections and headers. It's only the traditional 
presentation that doesn't clearly display this. And usually there's no 
need to hierarchially markup figures but I guess somebody could use 
examples and sub-examples.


[1] Obviously, taking the value of title and adding 's' doesn't create 
correct plurar form for that many languages. Is this something that 
needs to be solved on markup level or can it be solved with CSS?

-- 
Mikko

Received on Friday, 8 August 2003 13:41:43 UTC