Re: Request for ::di pseudoelement

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 4:12 AM, Patrick Garies <pgaries@fastmail.us> wrote:
> On 12/21/2009 8:30 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>
>> <table>  certainly provides all the structure one needs, but it doesn't
>> feel like the semantically right element to use - I'm presenting
>> key/value pairs, not 2-dimensional data.
>
> What's the difference between "key/value pairs" and "2-dimensional data"
> exactly?

A non-trivial second dimension.  By recoding the <dl> as a <table> in
this way, you're saying that each row represents a group (reasonable),
and the first column is "key" while the subsequent columns are
"value".  That latter bit doesn't feel significant enough to me to
make it *actually* 2-dimensional; it just feels like it is squeezing
semantics into a shape that doesn't quite fit.


> That's somewhat verbose though; |di| would seem to make more sense if you
> don't need the extra elements and want fairly standard styling. I have to
> wonder why such a frequently requested element is still not in the HTML5
> spec.

Because Hixie believes that the grouping of <dt>/<dd>s is sufficiently
defined in HTML and doesn't need an explicit structure to encode it.
Fantasai's offered some good arguments to the contrary that I wasn't
able to come up with on the spot when I was talking about it with
Hixie recently.  I've sent them over to him and we'll see if he thinks
it's convincing.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 22 December 2009 17:09:12 UTC