Re: The Semantic Debate

John Foliot schrieb:
>>> Or are you suggesting adding both?  That to me seems
>>> counter-productive and more confusing.
>> Why? That way people that find RDFa is too complex can limit
>> themselves to the predefined (and prefixed) classes that we put in
>> the spec. For the people that want the full power of RDFa can use the
>> role attribute. 
> 
> Jonas, I'm sorry if we are simply not understanding each other, but this
> makes no sense.  There is the means to identify semantic value, and then
> there is the value itself.  If you desire a collection of common meanings,
> then I for one would have no issue with that - heck, I think a lot of the
> accessibility advocates would volunteer to help create that collection.
> 
> The issue becomes the vehicle that delivers those values: the already
> used/abused @class attribute, or the new, still fresh and tender @role
> attribute.

This is starting to get religious. Role is the ultimate accessible 
solution, while class is old and dirty cruft that reminds us of tag soup 
and must not be accessible. Right. Thing is, the class attribute isn't 
abused. It is currently used as it was designed. Even better, many 
authors chose meaningful class names, which gives us the opportunity to 
make existing and future documents more accessible, without requiring 
authors to learn new concepts (which would probably fail anyway).

You have to realize that many authors don't care or even know about 
accessibility -- and they won't add role attributes or class names with 
a strange prefix just for fun. We should encourage them to use more 
meaningful class names rather than calling that abuse.

--Dao

Received on Monday, 7 May 2007 22:08:52 UTC