[whatwg] Attributes vs. Elements
ddailey
ddailey at zoominternet.net
Mon Mar 12 15:51:50 PDT 2007
Robert wrote:
> As I followed the thread, thinking about styling the element was the
> clincher for me. IE 6 doesn't support attribute based selectors. So, I,
> for one, couldn't use it until IE 6 (haven't tested attribute selectors in
> IE 7, since I stopped using them in light of IE 6) lost most of it's
> popularity.
>
The ease of using DOM methods to find tags, as opposed to attributes, tends
to suggest that all things having href's should be easily findable by
script. <a> works nicely for that, but would the availability of a
document.links array then include all things with href's?
Tags are rather like nouns while attributes are rather like adjectives.
Though those linguistic functions themselves are sometimes fluid.
A red circle -- A circular redness
There are known cross-cultural differences in which attributes define
things, as for sorting. Navajo children, as I recall are more likely to sort
by shape than Anglo-Americans. (Castaneda did some studies I think in the
1960's). I do remember finding some of the part-of-speech distinctions in
Navajo as counterintuitive.
Existing cultural relativity would tend to suggest no easy way of resolving
the issue from a "cognitive" perspective.
It would seem then, best, in this case to default to the status quo.
ddailey
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