[whatwg] several messages about <cite>

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Shannon wrote:
> 
> > All of them. "class" isn't intended for styling, it's intended to 
> > subclass elements.
>
> Regardless of the intention of the class element it is NOT used in the 
> real world to subclass anything but styles and custom script. We may 
> wish otherwise but that is irrelevant. The value of class to me is:
> 
> * To get style information out of the content stream.
> * To allow the re-use and grouping of style information.
> * To provide alternate styles for printing, or user choice.
> * To identify related elements to javascript code.

Sure, and that's fine -- so long as the subclassing is done in a way that 
isn't specific to the desired presentation, there's no clash with the 
intent of the attribute.


> In a perfect world, yes. In reality the people involved may not even 
> work for the same company. I can see a situation arising where the 
> "meaning" of classes are being assigned by a company like Google for use 
> with their crawler but those classes are already be in use for 
> presentation purposes. How will the crawler know which uses are 
> intentional and which are not. How will the designer know which classes 
> are "reserved", when the system that will use them may not even exist 
> yet.

Ironically (given that you proposed using rel="" instead) as far as I know 
Google has never based anything on class values, but has used rel="" 
values (like rel="nofollow").


> As do I but that isn't relevant to the problem. If you feel that class 
> should have a purpose other than it's widely used ones (styles and JS) 
> then HTML5 must provide an alternative for these uses.

I don't understand why you think it's an alternative use. All of these 
uses are subclassing the element, the styling and scripting is then hookd 
on those subclasses.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'