On Jun 2, 2008, at 15:40, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
The disadvantage of using a data-* attribute is that more kinds of
mistakes would be undetectable by a validator. It would have no idea
that (a) the value of the attribute must be the ID of an element
elsewhere in the document, and (b) each value must be unique within
the
document.
I wonder if the data-* attribute naming scheme could be classified
somehow to allow basic type checking like this. I expect there will be
other cases where authors want an attribute value to match the ID of
an
element in the page.
I don't like the idea of trying to encode the datatypes of data-*
attributes in a validator-sensitive way. What datatypes would a
validator support for data-* attributes? The HTML5 datatype library
used by Validator.nu already contains 41 datatypes, but people will
likely want to have others. The whole point of data-* is to provide a
place where a validator doesn't go without authors having to abuse
e.g. title which is a freeform but exposed to humans.
The foreseeable problem with data-* is, of course, that microformat-
like activity will happen there instead of going through the trouble
of getting unprefixed validator-sensitive attributes minted with
community review in the WHATWG and the HTML WG.
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
