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

[Elias Torres]

Thanks for your patience trying to work out these extremely hypothetical
examples with me. I need to figure out a way to get the internal
examples out here so we can discuss them concretely. In the meantime,
you have motivated me to look at the existing infrastructure with a
different perspective and try to see how we can solve our problems
without adding new attributes.

One of the key problems I'm trying to solve is to have a single parser
for all HTML files. I'll keep the list posted on my progress on that and
come back when I have more information on the rest.

Thanks.

-Elias

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Elias Torres wrote:
>>>> <div> <span class="ibm-part-description">our part number <span
>>>> class="part-id">123</span></span></div>
>>> Yes? What about it?
>> I guess this is similar to Karl's example.
>>
>> <div id="order1" class="ibm-order">
>>    <span class="ibm-part-description">our part number
>>        <span class="part-id">123</span>
>>    </span>
>> </div>
>>
>> part-id would according to microformats be a property of 
>> ibm-part-description existential instead of order1. Is there way to 
>> specify that kind of behavior. Would include do the trick here?
> 
> I don't understand what you mean by "existential" in this paragraph.
> 
> If you are saying "how do we make the pard-id be a property of the order 
> instead of the description", then the answer is:
> 
>    <div id="order1" class="ibm-order">
>     <span class="ibm-part-description">our part number</span>
>     <span class="part-id">123</span>
>    </div>
> 
> 
>>>> Microformats is very restrictive in how you can parse the data.
>>> I don't understand why you think this. Could you elaborate?
>> I guess restrictive is the wrong word, it's only defined to say you must 
>> grab the entire HTML content within the element. Fair enough again. 
>> Although, I'd like to differentiate between HTML sub-content, plain text 
>> and also specify which data type. quantity is an integer/long/etc.
> 
> Well, you can define your structure pretty much as you like, nothing 
> forces you to define "description" in the example above as being the 
> entire contents, you could just as easily say that your processing model 
> only involves the direct child text nodes, or some such.
> 
> 
>>>> We need the flexibility of specify the content everywhere, yet the 
>>>> property apply to any element on the page, not just the parent 
>>>> element.
>>> Again, concrete examples would really help me understand this?
>> In some part of the page....
>>
>> <div id="picture1">
>> <img src="picture1.jpg">
>> </div>
>>
>> Now somewhere else in the page....
>>
>> <div>
>> <span about="picture1" property="dc:title">A Night in Venice</span>
>> <div>
>>
>> Here I'm able to connect two elements in the page. I'm not sure how I 
>> would use id to differentiate the two.
> 
> Why would you need this? Just have:
> 
>    <figure>
>      <img src="picture1.jpg" alt="">
>      <legend> A night in Venice </legend>
>    </figure>
> 
> If you could provide a URI to a document showing why you need the legend 
> and the figure split from each other, that would be very useful.
> 
> 
> I can't emphasise enough that it would really help if you could point to 
> some real world examples (with URIs) showing what we are talking about. 
> Currently, as I've mentioned before, it feels very hypothetical.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 5 Dec 2006, Elias Torres wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I really don't follow. Why do you need prefixes? What is "hacky" about the 
> well-defined and accessible extension model in HTML today?
> 
> 
>> 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.
> 
> You know which are which. You invented them. (Although, what's a class 
> value that _isn't_ a "property/class(type)" ?)
> 
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Don't use class for styles. Problem solved.
> 
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Could you show me Web pages that are trying to do what you are referring 
> to, which would benefit from what you are describing? It would really help 
> me understand what problem you are trying to solve.
> 
> 
>> Do you see any workable solution?
> 
> To be honest I don't understand the problem, let alone have a solution.
>