- From: Mark Birbeck <mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 16:07:14 +0100
- To: "Doug Schepers" <schepers@w3.org>
- Cc: anthony.grasso@cisra.canon.com.au, public-xhtml2@w3.org, "Simon Pieters" <simonp@opera.com>, aleventh@us.ibm.com, www-svg <www-svg@w3.org>
Doug/Anthony, A couple of quick points (inline): > [snip] > > Right, the 'role' attribute can be used to simply provide some semantics > without any behavior, so you could label something as related to > navigation, or as a banner ad, or pretty much any other categorization > that people find useful. The 'class' attribute could also be used this > way, but that's more controversial, since some people think that CSS > should only be used for styling, and that attaching semantics to it adds > content. The problem with @class is that it is intentionally designed to say nothing that is 'global' That means that you are quite entitled to have @class="navbar", as am I, and HTML pretty much guarantees that there will be no problem arising. That's not the same as @rel, which was defined to have a specific list of values. So to use @class to say "menu" or "navbar" would be unwise, since you'd be trying to create a global definition for something that is specifically engineered *not* to allow global definitions. (That hasn't stopped people from trying to co-opt @class in this way.) By the way, in the early drafts of @role, the original creators (T. V. Raman and Steven Pemberton), specifically said that a new attribute was needed because @class could not be used in this way. [snip] > No, I think you just caught a different boat, but it's also traveling in > a useful direction. It's good to have people thinking in different > directions. That 'role' can be useful to offscreen uses (not just > print, but pre- or post-processing, and for a variety of tasks with > XSLT) reinforces that it is is useful to add. Definitely...I remember presenting on @role at a W3C mobile workshop a few years ago, and the immediate use-case that people were thinking of was that a server would be able to reorganise a page for a mobile device, once it knew which parts of the page served what purpose. Regards, Mark -- Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232 http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com standards. innovation.
Received on Friday, 5 October 2007 15:07:26 UTC