[whatwg] foreign attributes Re: several messages about XML syntax and HTML5

[Elias Torres]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Elias Torres wrote:
....
> 
> 
>> Also, remember, we are going after a declarative mechanism that binds 
>> "structure" to presentation and we don't know ahead of time all of the 
>> properties that are attached to a structure.
> 
> I don't see why this is a problem. The mechanism is (by definition) 
> extensible. That's the point.
> 
> 
> It would really help if you could point to some real world examples (with 
> URIs) showing what we are talking about. Currently it feels very 
> hypothetical.
> 

I think we keep focusing on the ways to extract information and I don't
disagree that we could find a million ways to hack class attributes to
do so. I can see myself doing class="about-subjectName",
class="predicate-propertyName", and so on. If anything, what I'm asking
for is a less hacky way of using "ibm-xxxxx" for everything and maybe
have a way to denote a prefix and a property attribute to different
properties from classes. Let me know if this would bring down HTML5 if
we were to try.

On the other hand, we keep missing the point, that no matter what the
syntax is, in microformats at least (our current answer) we can't
differentiate from class values that are properties/classes(types) and
which ones are not. In our scenarios that we have been exchanging is
nothing but ideal to see how the structure maps to our data and how easy
 is to write JS to get at it. However, we are looking for a mechanism
that focuses on property attribute to know when someone indicated a
property as opposed to just a style. It's like imagining a generic
microformat extractor that generates JSON objects on any random webpage
with a lot of different styles and a few hCards here and there. Is this
really ideal? I think that before HTML5 microformats did what it could
with what is there (not to say that HTML isn't semantic at all today),
but if we can define more clearly defined attributes to do so, why not?

Do you see any workable solution? Is there something we can try? I'm
willing to write up test cases.

-Elias