[whatwg] Significant inline content vs. attributes and sectional elements

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 22:08 +0000 UTC, on 2006-03-09, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 9 Mar 2006, Henri Sivonen wrote:

[...]

>> 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.

Wouldn't a <placeholder> element be more appropriate then?

>  * 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.

I won't claim there might not be valid cases, but this seems like a bad
example to me. If something is not a link it should not be marked-up as such.
How useful is it to the user to provide a hyperlink that points nowhere?


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>