Re: [XHTML2] DESCRIPTION element (was: Re: [XHTML2] CITELANG, TITLELANG attributes)

At Wed, Jul 28, 2004 at 08:48:51AM +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 
> >For TITLE, the origin is the problem is the approach of entering actual
> >textual content into attributes. This is bad practice, and the original
> >problem should be fixed instead of adding some extra features to remove
> >some of the problems. Note that a TITLELANG attribute would not work when
> >the TITLE attribute contains texts in two or more languages, which is a
> >quite reasonable case. If the TITLE attributes were replaced by TITLE
> >elements, for example, making each TITLE element specify, by definition,
> >an informative title for its parent element, the problem would vanish in a
> >puff of logic: the TITLE element could and should be allowed to have
> >normal inline content, including elements with their own LANG (oops,
> >sorry, xml:lang) attributes.
> 
> So instead of having a TITLE attribute a DESCRIPTION element would be 
> needed? To not interfere with the "special" semantics of the TITLE element.
> 
> I have actually thought about such a thing before, since I wanted to 
> include ABBR in the title to mark up abbreviations. Obviously, that was 
> impossible.
> 
> It would also allow much more flexibility to style with CSS. See for 
> example pure CSS tooltips[1]. The only problem would be that it can be a 
> child of every element, even SEPARATOR I guess. But I don't know much 
> about that, it seems that Ian has a few objections in terms of 
> implementation.

Are you sure about this, though?  From what I can tell, one of the oldest failings
(or features, depending on your POV) of CSS is that you can't have selectors which
check for child elements.  So if you wanted to somehow apply a style to all elements
which were cited from a document in another language, you couldn't do this if you
had the xml:lang attribute on a child <description/> element.

TX


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