[whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

[Kristof Zelechovski]

"javascript:goBack();" is a labeled statement in JavaScript and the label is
"javascript".  What purpose does it serve in your inline code? 
SCRIPT[type="text/xml"] can be used for semantics, including RDF.
Inline styles and inline event handlers belong to deprecated legacy syntax.
Inline styles were more deprecated than inline event handlers, to the point
of banning them altogether.  Anyway, another inline intruder should not
expect a warm reception.
You can replace [style] with [class], thereby moving the style to an
external resource, but shortening the code in [onevent] does not make it any
better.  There is no external declarative way of attaching event handlers to
elements, except in Microsoft Internet Explorer where you can have CSS
behaviors and SCRIPT[for] (and FUNCTION ID_ONEVENT in Visual Basic Scripting
Edition), but these are proprietary extensions.
Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org
[mailto:whatwg-bounces at lists.whatwg.org] On Behalf Of Eduard Pascual
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 2:13 PM
To: whatwg at lists.whatwg.org
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Ghosts from the past and the semantic Web

I think some of you got my point quite better than others; and maybe I
should clarify the idea. I see no issue with having some attributes to
embed semantics inline within the HTML, the same way we have style to
embed presentation. The issue is about *forcing* these semantics,
which are not the structure of the document, into the HTML, which is
intended to represent structure.
Although I tried to simplify using only the CSS paralellism (also,
presentation is what ruined HTML3.2, while behaviour just stood
there), Toby has seen deeper than the example and got the exact point
;-) (although I don't entirely agree with the analogy).

Following on with the parallellism:

style="...": inline styles, quite related to things like
onclick="javascript:goBack();" (inline script statements); this would
be equivalent to the current property="" and about="". There is no
issue with them, just that I feel they are not enough. This solves
some cases, but not all.

class="..." when used explicitly to tie with a CSS .class selector;
relates to the usages of onclick="javascript:myFunction();" (rather
than doing all the work there, it hooks with a function defined
somewhere else); and there is currently no equivalent for semantics.

<style> and <script> are used to define document-wide styles and
behaviors. Once again, we lack something to achieve this for
semantics. Introducing a <metadata> element as suggested could be a
solution (I'd rather prefer <semantics>, but that's mostly a matter of
taste), but if somebody has any better idea I'd be glad to hear it.

<link rel="stylesheet"> and <script src="..."> allow to import
stylesheets and scripts that might be shared by several documents. I
guess <link> could be used to import semantics as well.