[whatwg] Where did the "rev" attribute go?

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jul 12, 2006, at 17:57, Robin Lionheart wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> And then what? Why is it useful that a computer knows that a  
>> string on a Web page is a human name?
> Off the top of my head, a couple possible benefits of tagging  
> proper names:
>
> * smarter search engines
>    (<name>Bill Gates</name> is not the words "bill" and "gates".  
> Could be beneficial to newspaper sites.)

For the search engines internal to news sites this could be  
implemented using a private extension if it was deemed worth the  
trouble.

As for general search engines, this isn't really a problem. If I  
Google for "bill gates", I get results about Bill Gates--not about  
invoice stages or something similarly contrived. And I am pretty sure  
that if Google or a competitor wanted to do something smart with  
names on Web pages, they'd be better off seeding a guessing machine  
with phone book data than by insisting that everyone change their  
markup.

> * speech synthesis
>    (Surely there's a good reason CSS3 Speech has "interpret-as:  
> name" and VoiceXML has interpret-as="name")

"The interpret-as property has been temporarily dropped until the  
Voice Browser working group has further progressed work on the SSML  
<say-as> element."
...says the latest CCS3 Speech WD.

I don't see interpret-as="name" in VoiceXML 2.0 or 2.1.

> * spell checking
>    (Usable by Web page editing software)

Spell checkers work just fine without knowing what words are names.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/