Re: IDs vs. Classes

 From: Bert Bos <bbos@mygale.inria.fr>
| 
| Scott E. Preece writes:
| 
| It's not very readable anymore, but I agree that some form of logical
| connectors might be useful. Especially the &, since it is not
| expressible in any other way. How about
| 
|     <P class="abstract,rationale">
| 
|     P.abstract.rationale
| 
| (for CSS *after* level 1, of course.) This is a simple and readable
| notation for the &-case. For the or-case we might be able to find
| something with a comma.
---

That would be fine, too.  My primary concern is just that the spec make
it clear and that it not be confusing (e.g., using "+" for AND would be
confusing because some logic notations use it for OR).

---
|  > 2) My more serious concern is that Cougar has mis-specified the CLASS
|  > attribute.  It says it's a comma-separated list of classes, but both the
|  > standards (i18n and tables) that include CLASS say it's a
|  > space-separated list of classes.  This needs to be fixed in Cougar
|  > before people go off and implement it.
| 
| Actually, I think the comma is better, since it allows spaces in class
| names. Cougar should explain that class names are separated by commas
| and also `normalized', i.e., trailing whitespace is removed, all
| sequences of whitespace are replaced by single spaces, and all letters
| are case-insensitive.
---

Aren't spaces in class names ruled out by their being defined to be SGML
names?

But the issue here is that the RFCs are the closest things we have to
genuine, open-systems standards for HTML, and it looks really bad for
W3C to act as though it can "improve" them at will.

---
|  > Again, there are two possible meanings of having multiple values.  It
|  > would make prefectly good sense to OR together IDs, but, as you note,
|  > not to AND them.
| 
| SGML doesn't allow multiple IDs on an element, so, unlike CLASS, there
| is no need for logical connectors on IDs.
---

As I said, multiple IDs only make sense for the OR interpretation, as
a notational convenience

	P.p177,p123,p197,p224

is more convenient than

	P.p177 P.p123 P.p197 P.p224

and arguably faster to parse.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Tuesday, 8 October 1996 13:33:55 UTC