[whatwg] Attributes vs. Elements
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Mon Mar 12 14:22:40 PDT 2007
On Mon, 12 Mar 2007, carmen wrote:
> >
> > Finally, I'd like to conclude with this reductio ad absurdum of the
> > XHTML2 approach. If assigning behavior and semantics to attributes is
> > so much better, why not just have a single <elt> element:
> >
> > <elt role="paragraph">My cat is really cute: <elt
> > src="mycat.jpeg">picture of my cat</elt>. Check out <elt
> > href="story.html">this <elt role="emphasis">hilarious</elt> story
> > about her</elt>.</elt>
>
> this is a valid approach. the next step is to factor out <elt> and
> simplify the syntax, preferably reusing JSON or the Relax-NG compact
> syntax. then it would be more readable than either suggestion here.
Let's try to simplify it to XML, since XML is so popular. First, we
have to make the example a bit more explicit about what it is doing,
because right now it doesn't say what kind of link the src="" and
href="" attributes are creating (are they linking script? stylesheets?
a permalink for the page?):
<elt role="paragraph">My cat is really cute: <elt rel="image"
src="mycat.jpeg">picture of my cat</elt>. Check out <elt
rel="hyperlink" href="story.html">this <elt
role="emphasis">hilarious</elt> story about her</elt>.</elt>
Now let's see what we can do about making it simpler...
<elt role="paragraph"> could be <p>
<elt rel="image" src="..."> could be <img src="...">
<elt rel="hyperlink" href="..."> could be <a href="...">
<elt role="emphasis"> could be <em>
...so we now have:
<p>My cat is really cute: <img src="mycat.jpeg">picture of my
cat</img>. Check out <a href="story.html">this <em>hilarious</em>
story about her</a>.</p>
...and we're nearly back to HTML!
> i also think its important that userdefined elements can inherit
> from other elements via the normal ECMAscript prototype idioms, so
> that one can eg, <time>.property("dc:date").prototype = <span>,
> we'll always have semantic ambiguity and shoehorning of semantics
> into classnames and other attributes until theres the equivalent of
> the stylesheet providing referencable URIs describing any element -
> unless we want to stick to the boring world where theres only the
> elements that enough people could agree upon.
I really don't understand what you're proposing here. What is the
problem you are trying to solve?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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