On [Sep 27], at [ Sep 27] 4:27 , Toby A Inkster wrote:
If any style sheet language can be used, why don't microformats
create
their own style language eg:
<span class="bday" style="bday.1968-01-04">4th Jan, 1968</span>
By definition, the contents of the style attribute must be in "the
default style sheet language". The default style sheet language is
by definition CSS unless a Content-Style-Type header (either HTTP
header or <meta http-equiv>) is present. There can only be one
default style sheet language per document, thus any document which
wants to use a non-CSS style sheet language in the style attribute
cannot use CSS in the style attribute. (That is, you can't use CSS
in some style attributes and non-CSS on others.)
That's certainly a reason not to make this a recommendation for
everyone, but as we already have two alternative methods (machine data
as human data and abbr-design-pattern), I'm not convinced we should
discount this idea altogether. Conflict with CSS is only an issue
with inline CSS, which is widely regarded as a poor practice anyway,
especially among publishers paying enough attention to have concerns
about the abbr-design-pattern. And it may not even be an issue there,
as CSS says user agents "must ignore declarations with invalid
values." [1]
I'm afraid we may be dismissing this too hastily. My initial reaction
to this idea was to view it as semantic abuse of the style attribute,
but after thinking about it more, I now think it makes a lot of sense
that "1968-01-04" should be treated as styling instructions for "4th
Jan, 1968." We already have different kinds of styling instructions
in CSS (i.e. visual, aural, and physical). I'd argue that this is a
simply another type of instruction, context-dependent, just as much
explaining how the content should be presented, e.g. it should be
presented in whatever way ISO 8601 dates are presented in a given
context. There may be good reasons this won't work, but I don't think
the fact that no one has previously used @style for anything other
than CSS is one of them. After all, the same was widely true of
@class before we started promoting the alternative uses allowed under
the HTML spec.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/conform.html#conformance
Peace,
Scott
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