Re: domain distinction between @role and @class is unenforceably vague [was: Re: p in address tag?]

<snip />

> Well, I'm glad I'm getting @role (I hope)
>
> > The real difference between @role and @class is not semantic: what it
> > can mean; but computational: how you can computationally learn about
> > what it means. @class gives you opaque tokens. There is no good
> > Web-wide practice for associating such tokens with machinable, and
> > clearly delimited, knowledge (roughly bundles of assertions). @role
> > gives you something that can be expanded into a URI. RDF gives you a
> > Web-standard way to associate assertions with this URI. So this is a
> > chain of Web-standard "communicative gestures" that allow us to
> > clearly import a known cluster of assertions to a current element
> > instance.
>
> Except, after starting down this road, I stepped back a bit to
> re-examine what I was thinking.  While @role is great because of it's
> extensibility through RDF, was it not also originally envisioned as a
> support to ACCESS, although it could be applied to any element?  My
> original understanding was that it was identifying a conceptual block of
> information, such as "banner" or "contentinfo", as much spatially as
> conceptually, providing yet another method of traversing a document,
> using semantic understanding.
>
> But what I originally thought for ADDRESS is not so much block
> information per se, but rather granular information within a block.
> Perhaps it is more meta information than I originally surmised, so would
> not the property attribute would be more appropriate?

Role hasn't been traditionally talked about as a scoped attribute;
i.e. it targets the document, not it's container.

> Which makes more sense here:
>
>         <address role="author">John Foliot</address>
>         <address role="company">WATS.ca</address>
>         <address role="city_state">Ottawa, ON</address>
>         <address role="country">Canada</address>
>         <address role="email">foliot@wats.ca</address>
>         <address role="website">http://www.wats.ca</address>
>
> or
>
>         <address property="author">John Foliot</address>
>         <address property="company">WATS.ca</address>
>         <address property="city_state">Ottawa, ON</address>
>         <address property="country">Canada</address>
>         <address property="email">foliot@wats.ca</address>
>         <address property="website">http://www.wats.ca</address>
>
> (ref: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-metaAttributes.html#sec_23.3.)

Neither actually since the address element specifies that it's
contents are an address, not a partial address. What would be closer
is:

<address id="creator role="creator_address">
         <span about="#creator" property="author">John Foliot</span>
         <span about="#creator" property="company">WATS.ca</span>
         <span about="#creator" property="city_state">Ottawa, ON</span>
         <span about="#creator" property="country">Canada</span>
         <span about="#creator" property="email">foliot@wats.ca</span>
         <span about="#creator" property="website">http://www.wats.ca</span>
</address>

Though a simpler, more concise version would be:

<address role="creator_address">
         <author>John Foliot</author>
         <company>WATS.ca</company>
         <city>Ottawa</city>
         <state>ON</state>
         <country>Canada</country>
         <email>foliot@wats.ca</email>
         <website>http://www.wats.ca</website>
</address>

<snip />

--

Orion Adrian

Received on Thursday, 10 November 2005 18:27:08 UTC