[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 Feedback

[Matthew Thomas]

On 9 Dec, 2004, at 4:43 AM, Matthew Raymond wrote:
>
> Matthew Thomas wrote:
>>
>> On 8 Dec, 2004, at 3:19 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>>
>>> (One of the main reasons I haven't yet specified the tree control in 
>>> the Web Apps draft is that I can't work out how to make it support 
>>> the basic things a tree control needs to support while still having 
>>> some sort of backwards-compatibility story, btw.)
>>
>> <select id="wiblet" initialsort="flavor">
>>   <shead>
>>     <sh data="Name">
> ...
>    I notice you have a lot of elements there that imitate the elements 
> for tables. Why not just use <table> as a basis for this instead of 
> select?
>
> | <table>
> |  <colgroup>
> |   <col usetree id="col_name"/>
> ...

Because, while more elegant, that doesn't have "some sort of 
backwards-compatibility story". I click on it, it does nothing.

> ...
>    Currently, WA1 only defines <menu> as being a HTML5 menu when it's 
> inside a <menubar>, so all a UA has to do is look for the proper 
> parent element. Otherwise, the current specification treats <menu> the 
> exact same way as HTML 4.01. Because of this, there is no need for a 
> doctype with respect to menus.

Fair enough.

>> Even if goodwill was irrelevant, if you made HTML semantically 
>> complete enough to drop <div>, I guarantee you would have added too 
>> many block elements for authors to choose the correct one anything 
>> like most of the time. <div>, <b>, <i>, <sup>, <sub>, and <span> 
>> might be presentational tofu, but they keep HTML from being too 
>> complex, and that's important.
> ...
>    The elements <sup> and <sub> are not entire presentational. For 
> example, how do you represent a chemical formula in HTML? If a title 
> has a power at the end, how do you indicate that? Granted, they have a 
> presentational component to them, but that presentation itself has a 
> semantic meaning.

Exactly the same applies to <b> and <i> as to <sup> and <sub>. They're 
usually used to mean *something*, but a computer can't tell what it is.
<http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i>
<http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/09/semantic>

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/