Re: [RDFa] The CLASS attribute

Simone, Ivan, Steven,

I don't want to shut down discussion, but as Chair I have to make an
important point: the CLASS vs. ROLE decision is one that we already made
as a group, with many discussions and many telecons. If we want to make
progress, we need to have some deference for decisions already made
unless there is a very good reason to overturn them. So far, I'm not
seeing a good reason to overturn a decision, only a reason to bound it
(triple bloat).

Right now, the discussion is headed in the direction of "let's put
everything back on the table." We have to be extremely wary of this
approach. It means we have to put a hold on the Primer yet again. It
means any question raised sends us back to the drawing board when a
small fix might do the trick.

After we agreed on CLASS, I spent hours correcting this issue with other
groups (who saw my use of ROLE in an earlier Primer draft). Changing it
back would be a huge cost again. We must realize that such a change
would bear a huge cost, and for what benefit?

To address specific points:

> So, Using class with semantic meaning, this overload the current use
> of @class.

It's actually not overloading: Mark has explained very well how CLASS
was meant for semantics [1], and then CSS used that as a hook for style.
CLASS is not about style, though it can be used for style.

> So, if we use on a single page also more dialects we can have:
> 
> ... class="mystile first-dialect second-dialect" ...
> 
> and this is not clear also for humans and create more confusion also
> for machines.

If we go with namespaced classes, it actually looks quite clear to me.
Seems like a matter of taste on this front.

> It's a good idea use only "namespaced" class but if we can use a
> specific @attribute for semantic layes, this should be the best
> choice.

New attributes should be used sparingly. HTML already has attributes and
elements that provide semantics: LINK, META, REL, REV, and CLASS.
Inventing some new attributes is causing us great pain with folks who
don't like HTML extensibility. At the very least, we should be minimal
in our approach and consider each new attribute carefully.

-Ben

[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2006Dec/0018

Received on Wednesday, 14 February 2007 16:36:16 UTC