[whatwg] [WA1] <ol type=a> is semantic

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, James Graham wrote:
> 
> <p>The correct answer is <ref target="#correct" />) All of the above</p>
> 
> Getting a decent backwards compatibility story seems, uh, non-trivial at 
> the least. Of course this is true of CSS3 generated content as well but 
> that doesn't seem to bother people so much...

I like your idea. I don't know that there realy is a back-compat problem, 
we could just say that it accepts text content, so you could write:

   <p>The correct answer is <ref target="#correct">f</ref> All of the 
   above</p>

...until such time as enough browsers support <ref> that you don't worry 
anymore; since the answer number is (at least in this case) just 
additional information (the answer is given right there too) it isn't a 
huge problem if it is lost.

It would be nice to have an even better back-compat story, e.g. if it 
worked in current browsers without JS, but I don't see anything that can 
help us there (it's not like how <input type="number"> can fall back onto 
type="text" in legacy UAs).

BTW I'd be tempted to suggest that the attribute on <ref> be for="" and 
that it take an IDREF rather than a URI, to avoid any chance that people 
might try to refer to things in other documents and expect it to work, and 
also for consistency with <label for=""> and <output for=""> -- what do 
you think?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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