Re: A possible presentational hints proposal for CSS 2.1

(Speaking purely for myself and not for the working group:)

On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Stuart Ballard wrote:
> 
> Why not enumerate the "standard" presentational attributes, and then say 
> that additionally, all attributes not defined in the relevant 
> specifications are presentational?

I think the proposed way is less open to arguments. I could be wrong.


> That way any new attributes that get added to standard HTML are
> treated as non-presentational.

HTML has, I believe, buun end of lined.


> May I suggest including language that allows other XML vocabularies to 
> explicitly designate attributes as presentational if they want to?

That rather defeats the point, doesn't it?


> I wouldn't be surprised if other languages (I'm thinking of DocBook,
> for example, although I don't know enough about it to know if it
> applies or not) also have a legacy issue of presentational attributes.

If someone can give a very specific example, then I guess we could
consider it, but I am not aware of any such problem, and I am very wary
of adding loopholes without very good reason.


> I'm also not sure whether I agree with the choice to make no
> attributes presentational in XHTML. The fact that XHTML transitional
> exists at all suggests a desire to provide a version of XHTML in which
> presentational attributes are honored. Thus, I'd suggest treating
> XHTML Transitional as HTML, and all other versions of XHTML as XML.

We wanted to make all of HTML use the new system, only the legacy of
text/html resulted in the compromise proposal. There is no legacy XHTML to
speak of (in practice text/html doesn't count as XHTML), so the problem
doesn't occur there.


Your wording specifically said that some of the behaviour was up to the
UA; that, in my opinion, is very bad. It also introduces dependencies on
XHTML, which the working group has tried very hard to avoid, on the
request of the HTML WG, which said it doesn't want to be treated
specially.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 8 October 2002 13:58:08 UTC