- From: Lachlan Hunt <lhunt07@postoffice.csu.edu.au>
- Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2003 16:22:58 +1100
- To: www-html@w3.org
Karl Dubost wrote:
> Le dimanche, 2 nov 2003, à 13:12 America/Montreal, Tantek Çelik a écrit :
>
>> W3C can defined semantics of tags. Let's let authors keep and use
>> the class attribute for themselves. There is no need for W3C to
>> encroach upon this author space.
>
> :) agreed on that at 100% and here come the possibility to create
> another attribute sem="" for semantics. I don't say it's mandatory,
> just a possibility.
<snip/>
>> Thus you could have <span meaning='time'> be as semantic as <time> where
>> 'meaning' would be a new attribute introduced by a spec and have values
>> defined by W3C.
>
What additional value would defining a 'sem' or 'meaning' attribute
(I'll just use 'sem' from now on), along with a a set of allowed values
have over defining new tags? Defining every possible value for these
attributes would virtually impossible due to the, virtually, infinite
number of semantic meanings possible.
eg. Are you going to define what all these mean for a 'sem'
attribute?: time, date, fortran, c++, java, animal, species, planet, or
anything else you can think of?
Or, have I completely missed the point on this one?
>> But this is silly because if <time> is as semantic as <span
>> meaning='time'> or even <span m='time'> then why choose the longer
>> alternative? What value does it bring?
>
> Flexibility. A set of values for an attributes defines in different
> specifications: Time, Physics, geography, etc... could move forward
> faster and could be easily extensible.
>
> <code meaning="computing fortran maths">
> C --- piece of code of a math program
> C -------- IPRINT FOR MONITORING THE PRINTING
> IF(IWORK(3).EQ.0)THEN
> IPRINT=6
> ELSE
> IPRINT=IWORK(3)
> END IF
> </code>
> </pre>
This could be good if, for example, rather then defining a single 'sem'
attribute, attributes within different namespaces, defined by W3C, or
any other organization.
such as: computing:code="java" or physics:unit="Hz"
eg
<blockcode computing:code="java">
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
</blockcode>
or
<p>The frequency is <span physics:unit="Hz">50Hz</span>.</p>
<snip/>
> :) I would like to have a study on all people writing Web documents.
> How many of them are using Frontpage, dreamweaver in wysiwyg mode, how
> many of them are looking at the source code. I wish to have such a
> study too.
Just for information sake, I use notepad or dreamweaver in code view,
I very rarely use WYSIWYG because I find them so useless, especially
Frontpage because of the extra, invalid code it writes.
> To have been a teacher in University for the Web, I can tell that tags
> are the last thing they want to see and as soon as they have a
> wysiwyg, they use the wysiwyg mode.
I somewhat agree on this. As a university IT student, all my web
based subjects have told us that we cannot use WYSIWYG editors, and out
of the people I know in the IT course prefer hand coding, others prefer
the GUI. I am disappointed, though, that they are still teaching
broken, non standard HTML here (including all presentational elements,
and very little about CSS).
It's different for students in other courses when they make a web
page, but most of those students will probably never make another one in
their life because they're not interested.
Until a wysiwyg editor is created that is designed around page
structure, rather than around presentation, I'll always hand code. IMO,
Microsoft Word is getting *close* to this structure method with it's
style & formatting list: "Heading 1", "Heading 2", "body text", "plain
text", etc..., because these can be thought of as being *similar* to
<h1>, <h2>, <p> and <pre> elements, respectively, but it is still, very
much, style oriented. Plus Words generated HTML, as everyone here would
already know, is invalid.
CYA
...Lachy
Received on Monday, 3 November 2003 00:22:54 UTC