Too classy? (Was: storing info in XSL-FO)

In a message dated 20/08/2002 08:29:23 GMT Daylight Time, howcome@opera.com 
writes:


> > All HTML tells you is that something is a paragraph, a level 1 
> > heading, a table, monospaced, preformatted, and a few other things. 
> > <SINGER>Madonna</SINGER> is more semantic than <SPAN>Madonna</SPAN>. 
> 
> You can combine the two:
> 
>   <span class="singer">Madonna</span>
> 
> which preserves your semantic, while still using HTML and staying
> compatible with hundreds of millions of browsers. Using the CLASS
> attribute you can tranform any XML markup into HTML without losing
> information.
> 

Hakon,

This, I humbly suggest, is a recipe for disaster.

Do you suggest we create a namespace mechanism (or something functionally 
equivalent) for the value of a class attribute?

How else are we to disambiguate,
<span class="title">Queen Elizabeth</span>
from
<span class="title">School janitor</span>
from
<span class="title">SVG Unleashed</span>

in a narrative along the (contrived) lines of "Queen Elizabeth visited the 
school and the school janitor showed her a copy of SVG Unleashed in the 
school library"?

How do you suggest we capture structural/contextual semantic information 
within a class attribute?

This all seems too class-y for my taste. :)

Regards

Andrew Watt