Re: Internationalized CLASS attributes

Haijo Schipper <abigail@ny.fnx.com> wrote:
>[...]
>++ At 20:22 16/10/96 +0100, Bert Bos wrote:
>++[...]
>++ What we really need is something, like the RFCs relating to REV and REL,
>++ which suggest a set of useful class names that could be applied by anyone,
>++ irrespective of their country of origin. Admittedly most people would not
>++ then be able to use their native language to name such transportable
>++ classes, but the up-side would be that they would be able to identify
>++ information of the class they require without having to search for all the
>++ possible names for the class.
>
>Indeed. Having a uniform set of names is in my opinion more useful
>than using class names in a native language. (One can always do
>that for author-defined classes). After all, the element and 
>attribute names are in English too, aren't they?

	Each thing that gets "standardized" in an RFC becomes markup a
UA is expected to support, and whether it's an element, attribute or
naming convention simply affects the amount of "residual flexibility".

	There is no "practical" difference between:
	
	<A HREF="#one" REL="footnote"><SUP>1</SUP></A>
	[...]
	<A NAME="one" REV="footnote">First footnote.</A.

and:
	<A HREF="#one"><SUP>1</SUP></A>
	[...]
	<FN ID="one">First footnote.</FN>
	
Any UA which supported the (expired) HTML 3.0 FN already has what's
basically needed to support REL/REF="footnote", and vice versa,  It's
just a matter of tweaks in the UA's parsing code for support of one
to be extended into support for the other.


	Similarly,
	
	<CITE>Let's make HTML fully SGML conformant.</CITE>
and,
	<EM CLASS="citation">Let's make HTML fully SGML conformant.</EM>
	
could be made to display equivalently, as can:

	<AU>Joe English</AU>
and,
	<SPAN CLASS="author">Joe English</SPAN>
	

Via attributes and naming conventions for attribute values, one can
fine regulate the display of FN, CITE and AU far more extensively
than if you already are specifying the nature of the information
via an attribute naming convention, and are restricted to a list
of name values beyond that ('til all UAs support both style sheets
and marked sections):

	CLASS="author wants-marked-sections-instead-of-rfcs"
	
	The choice of how far up you go in the chain of elements,
attributes and naming conventions should depend, in large part,
on the extent to which a element constitutes a basic component
of any document's, or most documents', logical structure.

				Fote

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Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 10:51:27 UTC