[whatwg] Significant inline content vs. attributes and sectional elements
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Thu Mar 9 14:08:25 PST 2006
On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
> It seems to me that the WA 1.0 spec presents requirements on document
> conformance that are very different from each other in spirit in a
> seemingly arbitrary way.
>
> On one hand, some elements are required to have significant inline
> content or are barred from having traditional flow content while, on the
> other hand, the requirements on attribute occurrence are very lax and
> sectional elements are not required to have any content at all. These
> requirements seem very inconsistent in spirit to me.
Yeah, I haven't really thought these through yet.
Here are some of the things I'm worried about:
* It should be possible for scripts to add content to placeholder
elements without those placeholder elements being non-conformant.
This is a very useful programming idiom, not least of which because
adding content to an existing element (whether attributes or child
nodes) is a lot easier than adding the element in the first place.
* It should be possible to have a group of pages that have a similar
structure, with elements annotated as necessary. For example, a menu
list could be the same on each page, but with the currently loaded
page simply not having the "href" attribute on its link, or some such.
* It should always be clear from a semantic point of view whether the
content is a single "paragraph", or whether it is a group of
paragraphs.
> To make document conformance a more useful concept for the purpose of catching
> author errors, I suggest that the following attributes be made required:
> href and rel on link
> href on base
> name and content on meta (other than the encoding decl)
> src on img
> code, height and width on applet
> name and value on param
I've made a note of this in the draft so I don't lose track of it. Your
proposals make sense on the whole. Exceptions: <base target> may mean that
<base> should have either href or target. <img> might be a placeholder,
I'm still considering exactly what we want with that one.
> To allow user agents see whether the author provided the empty string as the
> alternative text of whether the author just didn't care, I suggest that the
> alt attribute on img be made optional.
I agree.
> Since sectional elements are document-oriented rather than Web
> application-oriented, it seems to me it would make sense to require them
> to contain one or more block elements as opposed to zero or more.
You can have empty sections. They might not be written yet, for instance.
> On the other hand, I have doubts about the requirement of significant
> inline content. When the W3C said that paragraphs mustn't be empty,
> various applications started emitting <p> </p>. If the WHAT WG says
> that paragraphs must contend significant inline content, are the
> developers of those applications suddenly going to decide not to allow
> them to paragraphs to be saved or are they going to come up with an even
> more crufty work-around to comply with the machine-checkable
> requirements of the spec?
I agree. I think I'll remove mention of the "significant inline content"
concept.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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