- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1999 05:17:25 +0200
- To: Frank Boumphrey <bckman@ix.netcom.com>
- CC: jelks@jelks.nu, www-style@w3.org
Frank Boumphrey wrote: > > But is there any > > real reason for CSS *excluding* recognition of class in XML, in other > words -- > > providing automatic recognition of class (or CLASS) regardless of the > semantics > > of the markup language in question? > > My feeling was that in XML the element WAS the class! Each element has one name, but class is a space separated list (a set) so elements can be subclassed, different-named elements can be put in the same class, and so on. For XML, class is really useful. Initial experiments seem to show that real XML+CSS implementations ignore the bit about "only HTML" and accept .foo as a selector for <elem class="foo"/> for xml too. It might be a good idea to formally acknowledge this, since IIRC the intention was to say "XML gramars might not do this, don't count on it" rather than "Thou Shalt Not". > > or using other attributes. But would it do *harm* to have a CSS '.attval' > > represent a shorthand of '[class="attval"]' -- even if it's not in > HTML/XHTML, > > where CLASS has a certain semantic? No, I don't think it would do harm and it could certainly do good. A redirection/renaming syntax might be useful, too, though it can always be expressed in a longer form anyways so is not strictly necessary. But in the meantime, useful work can be done with XML grammars that choose to have a class attribute. -- Chris
Received on Monday, 9 August 1999 00:46:09 UTC