On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:50 PM, austincheney
<[email protected]>wrote:

>
> On Jun 1, 5:26 pm, Andrew Dodson <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I was looking athttp://www.html11.org/
> >
> > <http://www.html11.org/>And wondered if the <religion> element will
> expose a
> > save() method with a callback handler.
>
> I was just looking at HTML11, and am sorely disappointed.


I'm also disappointed, for reasons similar to yours (i think, though I'm not
exactly sure since your vocabulary is considerably larger than mine).
Briefly, my complaints are:

1) not every new HTML11 addition has to be a new *element*,
2) class names are not appropriate for specifying these elements' behavior,
3) the purpose of the element's content is never expressed.

Many of the new elements would be better as new attributes instead of
elements. For instance, instead of the <religion> element, I'd rather see it
as an attribute. Something like:

<section religion="christianity">Jesus Saves!</section>
or
<audio religion="buddhism" src="sounds/one-hand-clapping.ogg">You are not
zen.</audio>

You could then have CSS like: [religion="christianity"] { background-image:
url(../images/jesus.png) }. I think THAT would have real value.

Speaking of religions, if we're adding new elements i think a <rant> element
would be apropos. Example: <rant religion=standardista>Long Live Graceful
Degradation! Progressive Enhancement 4-Eva!! Love Me Some Zeldman!</rant>.

All of the new element examples are of the element wrapping an image. I'm
assuming that for all the new elements, content placed inside the element is
for user agents that do not support the new element, though that's not
expressed. Additionally, for some of the elements it seems inappropriate for
them to have content.

For instance, the <silence> tag is one of my personal favorites. But why
would you wrap an image of a loudspeaker in a <silence>? Silence should *by
definition* be an empty element. Browsers that don't recognize it can (and
should) do nothing. Also, it should have attributes for duration, which
could be expressed in milliseconds or relative values such as
'uncomfortably-long.' Maybe also a boolean attribute for <silence golden />.

The <wind> element is a great idea, though the speed should not be specified
with a class name. Instead it could have a 'velocity' attribute that could
be expressed in knots or meters/second. The direction and the focus or
spread would be nice to control also.

The example for the <temperature> element is just silly. <temperature
class=" celsius 8">?!? "8" isn't even a valid class name!! I think we need a
<wtf> element.

Thinking about it more, the attributes for taste, temperature, smell should
go in their own module. It would be something like CSS, however i don't
think it belongs in CSS since CSS is primarily for *visual* styling. This
module could be something like Multi-Sensory Attribute Specification or MSAS
(or something much punnier/sassier). With MSAS, you could describe an
elements smell, taste, texture, temperature, etc. A JavaScript API built
around those multi-sensory interactions would be freaking awesome. (See,
JavaScript! This thread is now relevant to this forum!)

In summary, I really like what they are trying to do here, but the
"everything is an element with optional class names" is a very, very limited
way to convey these import properties. The whole API needs to be retooled
before there is any hope of adoption by the major browser vendors. (I smell
a working group!)

Ben Barber

P.S. In case it's not clear, I do *get* HTML11. I think it's funny, but it
could be WAY better if the authors actually *got* HTML. In some ways it
reminds me of Google's Annotation Gallery for Java (
http://code.google.com/p/gag/), but much less awesome.

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