Re: code and blockcode

Laurens Holst wrote:

>
> Simon Siemens schreef:
>
>> However omitting this attribute doesn't make much sense to me, 
>> because we could step back to pre then. There is no advantage for any 
>> user agent (compared to pre). And I think adding this attribute is 
>> not a huge step for us but a reasonable benefit for some user agents 
>> (as pointed out above).
>
>
> Except that pre doesn’t say ‘it’s a block of code’ but ‘it’s a 
> preformatted block of text’. The difference is in the semantics...

Yes, we have additional semantics by "code" and "blockcode". But what is 
the usage? It's the same as adding a tag for exclamation sentences like:

<p>This is a little text. <exclamationsentence>But be careful while 
reading it!</exclamationsentence>. With more text.</p>

I can find many, many tags that add semantics, but without any usage for 
any kind of user agents. This blows up the standard, but doesn't help 
anybody.

The reason we are adding semantics to a document is, that we want to 
enable user agents to do a better job. But a semantical tag does not 
offer any benefit for any kind of user agent, this tag is waste. If I 
say, all user agents behave the same way for "code" like for "pre", but 
we have additional semantics, these additional semantics do not justify 
the "code" tag, because we have no benefit by it.

Thus, to have a XHTML tag we need

    1) A semantic meaning
    2) A benefit for an user agent (not for all user agents but some of 
them).

With the "codelang" attribute we have semantics and a benefit for at 
least search engines.

Simon

Received on Tuesday, 12 July 2005 10:14:28 UTC