On Tuesday, April 28, 2009 3:16 PM, Jacob Rask wrote:
has there ever been any discussion on including an attribute to the
code element, specify the programming language in the markup? If so,
what was the conclusion? I didn't find anything in the list archives.
Having just converted a 200+ page document with a lot of in-lined code to
HTML , I found myself
rather taxed by the limitations of <code> , so while I like your suggestion
(which does seem
to appear in the draft spec [1]) , I need to offer some observations of my
own:
(disclaimer: I may well have been working on incorrect assumptions)
1. Having to type <pre><code><tagname></code></pre> seemed a little bit
silly to me:
is there a use case for *not* wanting <pre> when doing <code>? Could that
not be handled as an attribute of the <code> if so?
2. having to escape "<" as < in the middle of <code> seems like work for
the author that could just as easily be handled by the browser. In the old
days, <xmp> worked pretty well... why no replacement for its functionality??
3. trying to style a <code> so that it would have an indented margin, a
border, a default font-style (monospaced), preserve within -line
indentation, and work consistently across browsers seemed to defy my humble
abilities with CSS. (see
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/cs427/StateOfArt-Dailey.html#test_file
as an example of the very clumsy solution I ultimately opted for -- IE still
doesn't preserve within-line indentation in this solution-- it used a styled
table with a styled td and was particularly gross!.)
4. if we could just write
<code language="xml">
<html>
<body>
<svg><rect/></svg>
</body>
</html>
</code>,
it'd be nice to have the page render the HTML just as is.
5. Some of the good folks on either whatwg-irc or htmlwg-irc let me know
that <code><p>happy</p><p>sad</p></code> was bad form, and that I should use
<pre><code> instead. It never would have dawned on me that the first was bad
form, nor that the second would be good form. (maybe it should have dawned
on me, but I speak html sorta like I speak english, more through habit than
training, and not very formally at that). Second the introduction of <p>
within <code> was actually generated by a robot that converted a bunch of MS
Word to <html> so someone other than me must have thought it was a good idea
to do it that way.
regards
David
[1]
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-code-element
