- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 13:47:56 -0700
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- CC: "John Foliot - WATS.ca" <foliot@wats.ca>, 'Lachlan Hunt' <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>, www-html@w3.org, public-html@w3.org, tina@greytower.net, "'Patrick H.Lauke'" <redux@splintered.co.uk>, Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org
Maciej Stachowiak wrote: > On May 4, 2007, at 9:30 AM, John Foliot - WATS.ca wrote: >> One of the most exciting (to me) developments in the XHTML camp is the >> emergence of the ROLE attribute - as it now provides a means of >> "explaining" >> what something is or does... To quote the W3C spec: >> "The role attribute takes as its value one or more white-space separated >> QNames. The attribute describes the role(s) the current element plays >> in the >> context of the document. <snip> It could also be used as a mechanism for >> annotating portions of a document in a domain specific way (e.g., a legal >> term taxonomy)." >> http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-role/#s_role_module_attributes > > The purpose of the "role" attribute is addressed in HTML5 by the "class" > attribute, along with predefined classes. Personally I think this was a very poor decision. The problem is that you have user names and standard names mixed in the same namespace. So there's a big risk that the user accidentally ends up marking semantic meaning to their elements simply by wanting to style them. The only thing that can be done to help this problem (other than by using the role attribute) is to use really obscure names for predefined classes, which doesn't seem like a great idea either. / Jonas
Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 20:50:34 UTC