These are unnecessary features wrt accessiblity tools and search
engines; data mining techniques can easily handle them already. More
strongly, for legacy and advanced UI reasons, the data mining should
happen anyways, further questioning their merit. That's been my
experience in this area (from the analysis side). Features that provide
actual functionality would seem more pressing.
- Leo
Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Aug 25, 2009, at 11:21 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
Hi everyone,
Recently at Apple we've been considering our plans to implement new
HTML elements from HTML5. I'd like to share our thoughts with the
WebKit community and see if we are in sync before passing this on to
the HTML Working Group. Does anyone have thoughts to add to the below:
----------
I realized I forgot to cover <command> and <menu>.
- <menu>
The list form of a menu seems straightforward enough, it is good to
have a list type specifically for popup menus. The toolbar form does
not seem fully baked. First, it seems weird to think of a toolbar as a
kind of menu. Second, the rendering is too inflexible and
underspecified for the real Web content authoring use cases for
toolbars. And finally, an important point of toolbars in many
applications is that they can embed custom controls in a flexible
layout that also includes some standard buttons, but <menu
type="toolbar"> does not seem flexible enough to handle this. The
context menu form does seem genuinely useful. But it also seems like a
lot of complexity for the somewhat marginal case of overriding the
context menu. It seems like about a dozen different elements are
allowed, all with different processing requirements. This seems like
overkill for the use case of a context menu. It doesn't even make much
semantic sense for a context menu to contain a button. Overall, it
doesn't seem like the cases of menu list, toolbar and context menu
really share enough behavior or appropriate content model to make them
use the same element.
- <command>
It's unclear if this element is worth having without the use cases
for toolbars or menus, and it also has 0 implementations so far and
seems like it might not be fully baked.
- Sectioning elements: <section>, <article>, <aside>, <hgroup>,
<header>, <footer>, <nav>
These seem useful - they give a way to represent the semantics of
many Web pages nicely, and could work well with accessibility
features for navigating around the page, as well as other clever ways
of processing Web content. They are also trivial to implement (I
already did <nav>). We're fairly interested in doing the rest of these.
- <dialog> element
This essentially gives the same behavior as <dl> but with
appropriate semantics for logs of conversations. It seems useful and
easy to implement.
- Elements requiring changes to <legend> parsing: <figure>, <details>
These elements seem quite useful, but they will be unusable on the
public Web until all browsers are updated to change how they parse
<legend> and the new versions are widely adopted. Pretty much all
current browsers do something idiosyncratic when parsing a <legend>
element outside of a <fieldset>, which makes it impossible to make
<figure> or <details> degrade gracefully via script or style. We are
hesitant to implement elements that authors would feel they are
unable to use, or to lead authors astray, so we are hesitant to
implement the new elements until either the <legend> parsing issue is
widely fixed or HTML5 uses some element other than <legend> for the
caption on these elements. We will consider fixing our parsing of
<legend> outside <fieldset> soon, though, so that we're not the blocker.
- New media elements: <audio>, <video>
We love these and have them implemented. We don't see any
implementation issues in the current spec.
- <canvas>
We like this and we have it implemented. We don't see any
implementation issues in the current spec.
- Newly standard legacy elements: <keygen>, <embed>
We had these for a long time before they were in HTML5. It seems
like a good idea to cover them in the spec.
- <mark>
The basic idea for this element seems good, but the suggested UI
for exposing it does not seem to entirely match the use cases, and
may not be practical to deploy. Having tick marks in the scrollbar
for every <mark>, and UI to cycle between them, seems too heavyweight
for some of the suggested uses. We are interested in implementing the
basics of <mark> soon, but probably not the requirements.
- <time>
It seems useful for use cases like Microformats to have a clean,
unambiguous way to represent a specific time. It seems odd that there
are ways to get Date objects to represent the date, time and time
zone separately, but no way to get a Date representing the
combination of date/time/timezone. Wouldn't the latter be a common
use case, and doesn't the JavaScript Date object give sufficient APIs
to unpack a Date into its components as needed?
- New interactive controls: <meter>, <progress>
These elements seem useful and a good idea. These controls are
useful in native UI and often get hand-rolled by JavaScript
libraries. We would like to expose a default native look, but with
full author stylability for these. The only odd requirement is the
use of inline text content in the elements to represent the state of
the control. Specifying inline textContent may be a clever way to
pass the initial state, but it seems very clunk as an interface for
dynamically updating the state of the progress bar. Using the max and
value IDL attributes of <progress> seems like it would be much easier
for authors, and it seems like a problem that these only reflect the
markup attributes and not the full state of the control (if the state
is currently defined by text content). Likewise for the 6 attributes
on <meter>. Assembling up to 6 numbers into a textContent string,
which then does not cause the convenient DOM attributes to update,
seems very clinky.
- Ruby elements: <ruby>, <rp>, <rt>
/ We think these are useful. Google engineers are actively working
on the WebKit implementation and some initial patches have landed./
- <datalist>
Work on this is in progress. We think it is a good idea to offer a
way to do true combo boxes, including ones with a dynamic source of
filled-in values.
- <output>
This seems relatively simple to implement and worth implementing.
- new <input> element types
These seem generally useful, and we already have some implemented
to various extents (search, range, email, url tel). The only concern
is the sheer number of date and time controls. 6 of the 13 new input
types are for dates or times. Are there real use cases for all 6? Do
all 6 exhaustively cover the types of time and date input you may
want to do in forms?
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