Re: Predefined Class Names Solution

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> Philip & Le Khanh wrote:
>> Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>>> The disadvantage is that it doesn't directly pave the cowpath made by 
>>> existing content, such as the wide use of class=copyright.
>>
>> This last part I do not understand (all that precedes seems fine to 
>> me), perhaps because "paving a cowpath" is not an idiom with which I 
>> am familiar.
> 
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples
> 
> | When a practice is already widespread among authors, consider
> | adopting it rather than forbidding it or inventing something new.

OK, thank you, confirms my belief.  So it is reasonable to assume
that a number of documents contain 'class="copyright"'; /a priori/,
they contain that in order to (a) allow CSS of the form

 .copyright {}

or (b) to allow access via the DOM.  Nothing that I have heard
so far proposes stopping authors from continuing along their
well-trod cow track, but there /is/ a proposal that we now
highjack that cowpath with new semantics that no existing author
can have considered (since these semantics were undefined
at the time that the document was written).  Therefore it
seems that rather than "paving a cowpath", a proposal that
seeks to reserve 'class="copyright"' and ascribe to it
fixed semantics is not "paving a cowpath", but rather
"causing a cowpath to split into two routes".

I am still perfectly happy with 'class="_copyright"' to have
those fixed semantics, since the last time I tried to
use a leading underscore in a class name, something (perhaps
the CSS validator, perhaps Mozilla or IE) did not like it
and therefore I could not use it.  It therefore seems
highly unlikely to me that many have trodden that particular
path before, so it seems a safe path to pave.

Philip Taylor

Received on Monday, 7 May 2007 14:06:23 UTC