- From: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 04:32:35 -0500
- To: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- CC: www-html@w3.org, Robert Koberg <rob@koberg.com>, whatwg@whatwg.org
Jukka K. Korpela wrote: > On Sat, 26 Mar 2005, David Dorward wrote: > > >>HTML was designed before XML, XSLT and XHTML were, so it didn't take >>into consideration any design implications it would cause for them. > > That's correct, but in this issue, it was also designed without really > thinking in SGML terms. "Boolean attributes" (which are even called that > way in HTML specifications) don't fit into SGML philosophy, although they > were formally retrofitted into SGML formalism. It would be have been much > more SGML-like to have an attribute that takes two values, like "checked" > and "unchecked", the latter being the default, and the attribute name > being 'status' for example. What Jukka's trying to say is, attribute minimalization in SGML -- which lets you do things like <input type="checkbox" checked> doesn't let you leave out the name of the attribute -- it lets you leave out the *value*. So, for example, I could use attribute minimalization to shorten the 'type="checkbox"' part like so: <input checkbox checked> An easy fix to make the 'checked' attribute more template-friendly would be to introduce the 'unchecked' value Jukka suggests. Then you can use a checked="[test ? checked : unchecked]" type of construction to set the attribute in XHTML. ~fantasai
Received on Thursday, 31 March 2005 09:32:51 UTC