>>>If we wish to communicate that level of semantics, yes. It may not be >>>useful to us. If you *really* need some metadata/semantics, @class probably >>>can't convey it with enough granularity. Check out the big discussion from >>>a few months ago about ccRel and RDFa.
Not yet maybe, but we could at least try to keep options open for the future. >>Second: Suppose I want to collect all copyright notices from 1000 websites >>(don't ask me why, I just want to), how am I to do this when they are marked >>up in <small>s? I will definatly end up with a lot of text that has nothing >>to do with copyrights (and probably miss a lot of copyright notices as they >>are marked up differently) Whereas If they were maked up in (for example) >><span class="copyright"> I could retrieve it all based on the class-name. >>>That would be a wonderful perfect world. I'd like the copyright date as >>>well, so I can retrieve only things copyrighted in the last ten years. >>>Assuming that metadata will exist is a fool's errand. The fact is that if >>>you are searching for copyright notices, the most efficient way is likely to >>>just search for the string "copyright" and the (c) symbol. That'll net you >>>copyright notices with a high accuracy, and some training on real data can >>>yield further rules to improve the data-mining accuracy. You say it yourself, only in a perfect world where all websites in the world would be written in the same language would your "solution" work. Unfortunatly I would miss out on all the chinese copyright stuff. But another example (based on "siemens") wouldn't it be nice if I could tell Google I am looking for a person named "Siemens" so it would ignore the "brand"-name? >>>While we're hoping for copyright notices to be marked up as <span >>>class="copyright">, though, why not wish for <small class="copyright">? If >>>you're going to be providing metadata, it works the same. Is it that you >>>believe people won't provide a special class for copyrights if the <small> >>>tag already gives them the preferred display? Do you believe that everyone >>>will automatically use class="copyright" to mark up their copyright notices? >>> What if they use class="copyright-notice"? Or class="license"? Or any of >>>a million other distinct possibilities that would destroy any naive attempt >>>to datamine based on a particular class name? Well, that would have to be defined in the standard, wouldn't it? I'm not saying -again- it should be defined NOW, but at least leave the door open. I have no problems with using small over span, neither one is correct as far as I can see, in this context. Using "copyright" instead of "license" or "copyright-notice" would have to be defined somewhere, either in the standard or in an externally maintained "document" that is accepted as "best practice" or "standards related". PS: I find it very difficult to respond to rich-text/html messages as they seriously mess up the indentation. Sorry therfor if this message is unclear as original message and reply are mixed up.
