[whatwg] HTML syntax: shortcuts for 'id' and 'class' attributes

[Andrew Fedoniouk]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J. King" <jking at dark-phantasy.com>
To: "Andrew Fedoniouk" <news at terrainformatica.com>
Cc: "www-html" <www-html at w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 9:22 PM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] HTML syntax: shortcuts for 'id' and 'class' attributes


> On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:46:13 -0500, Andrew Fedoniouk 
> <news at terrainformatica.com> wrote:
>
>> Ian, what does this "backward compatibility" mean?
>
> I can't speak for what Hixie considers backwards compatible, but I can 
> tell you why a construct should as that which you're suggesting is not 
> backwards compatible: A start tag such as <p.myclass> would produce a 
> "p.myclass" element, not a "p" element as one would want to have.  This is 
> true for every element type, so any document that used this construct in a 
> majority or (horror of horrors) all of its element start-tags would have a 
> document cmnposed of elements entirely unknown to an HTML4 UA.  This is 
> unacceptable, especially considering the nominal gain.
>

So in your interpretation backward compatibility of HTML5 means that
HTML5 must be a subset of HTML4. That is not general intention I beleive.

I understand motivation to keep HTML5 as close as possible to HTML4 (but not 
to XHTML?)
thus to have reasonable, say, interoperability. Thus I think statement 
"backward compatibility" needs to
be reformulated. At least everybody shall have clear idea of what "backward" 
means.

Andrew.