On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, James Graham wrote:
>
> <p>The correct answer is <ref target="#correct" />) All of the above</p>
>
> Getting a decent backwards compatibility story seems, uh, non-trivial at
> the least. Of course this is true of CSS3 generated content as well but
> that doesn't seem to bother people so much...
I like your idea. I don't know that there realy is a back-compat problem,
we could just say that it accepts text content, so you could write:
<p>The correct answer is <ref target="#correct">f</ref> All of the
above</p>
...until such time as enough browsers support <ref> that you don't worry
anymore; since the answer number is (at least in this case) just
additional information (the answer is given right there too) it isn't a
huge problem if it is lost.
I don't think this is a good solution, simply because authors would never
use it. For instance, take any weblog with a quiz[1][2]; is it really
expected that the visitors should mark up their comments with <ref>s?
Matthew Thomas wrote:
I'd also like to see <ol type= reintroduced, for the reasons Simon gave.
It is especially semantically important in legal documents (for the same
reasons start= is).
I agree that making sure the numbering is correct in legal documents (and
other documents that have the same type of structure) is semantically
important. I don't think that automatically generated numbering is the way
to do it, though.
In a legal document, as I understand it, the fact that something is
*Section 4* is important. Not that it's the fourth section, but that it's
*Section 4*. If section 3 is removed, section 4 stays *Section 4*. (Because
you'd need to update all the documents which reference it, which would
never be done.)
An ordered list isn't appropriate for that situation. An ordered list is
appropriate for the situation in which I have 5 things I need to do, in
order. When I realize that I don't need to do thing #2, I now have four
things I need to do, in order.
So I don't think legal documents is an appropriate reason to reintroduce
type=.
That's an interesting view. Would it be more appropriate to use, for
instance,
# <ul>
# <li>(a) foo
# <li>(b) bar
# <li>(c) baz
# </ul>
...where the name of the item is more important than the order? If so, that
this satisfies my conserns. Thanks.
[1]
http://www.access-matters.com/2005/10/01/quiz-118-alt-text-or-title-text/
[2] http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/2004/08/13/sq_conclusion.html
Regards,
Simon Pieters
