[whatwg] Joe Clark's Criticisms of the WHATWG and HTML 5

[Charles Iliya Krempeaux]

Hello James,

On 11/1/06, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> >>     To take a slight detour into the (hopefully not too) abstract, what
> do
> >>     people think the fundamental point of semantics in HTML is?
> >>
> >
> > I'd say Machine readability.
> >
>
> Sorry to be pedantic but what do you mean "machine readable"? All
> (conforming) HTML documents are "machine readable" in the sense that
> they can be parsed by machines, and no machine is capable of
> understanding the actual content, so presumably you mean something else.
>

I mean so that a machine can understand what you are saying... what you
mean.

For example... I could write...

    And Jane Blow said... you are so cool.  To which I said... I know.

A machine (of today) isn't going to understand this.  But I could mark it up
with....

    <cite>
        And
        <address class="vcard"><a rel="friend met" class="url fn" href="
http://jane.example.com/">Jane Blow</a></address>
        said...
        <q cite="http://jane.example.com/1234.html#xyz">you are so cool</q>.
    </cite>
    <cite>
        To which
        <address class="vcard"><a class="url fn" href="
http://joe.example.com/"><abbr title="John Doe">I</addr></a></address>
        said...
        <q cite="http://jane.example.com/1234.html#zzz">I know</q>.
    </cite>

And a machine would understand that alot better.

Make sense?  (Or should I explain more?... I'm being lazy by asking this...
I just don't feel like doing alot of typing right now... but if it needs
more explanation let me know.)


See ya

-- 
    Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc.

    charles @ reptile.ca
    supercanadian @ gmail.com

    developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/
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