[whatwg] Attributes vs. Elements

[ddailey]

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