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

[Billy Wong]

On 3/10/06, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 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.

Rather than having a link with no "href" attribute, the same structure
can also be achieved by having a link with an empty "href" attribute.