On 1/28/06, Ben Ward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It's all
> about separating _documents_ into component parts. There's nothing
> presentational about them: You have headers on letters, official
> documents and all sorts, thus there's now an element to identify that
> section of a document. Same for a footer.
The question is, where do we stop? And how long do we wait for all
these new tags to be introduced? So we have <header>, <footer>,
<small>, <m>, <i>, <dfn>, <samp>, <var>, <sup>, <sub>, <kbd>, etc.
etc. etc. Are we eventually going to have a whole repository of
available tags? Will this get to the point where few web developers
will actually be able to remember what all the tags are? And if you
think about it, these tags are still not enough to convey all the
potential meanings that content may have.
I think the W3C realized that a long time ago, and I think WhatWG will
go at this for a couple more years and say, "hey, this html thing just
can't define everything, we need a technology that can support
applications, one that allows developers to define their own
information, and we need to make ways to define standards for using
existing elements," and they'll realize that this kind of
extensibility is available in xml, and they'll make a new technology,
called HTXML, and they'll start working on 1.0, while the W3C is
celebrating the formalizing of XHTML 2.0 and it's correct support in
Internet Explorer 8.
Let's face it, HTML5 is just an attempt to make html work for web
applications, but W3C realized that to make html work for web
applications, it would be best to utilize xml, rather than trying to
rewrite the existing html spec.
But even if you don't buy that argument, take this view: presentation
and semantics should be separate. Why? Because this is the problem
with HTML5: the person building the layout/structure has to also be a
semantics expert. With the complexity of web applications, this is
just not reasonable. Building the structure for a solid layout
shouldn't be mixed with making the content semantic. Just look at how
complicated this gets:
<header></header>
<navigation></navigation>
<article></article>
<footer></footer>
If I want all four containers to have similar CSS, I have to do:
header, navigation, article, footer { same stuff here }
And I sure hope nobody decides to add a sidebar, then I have to add:
header, navigation, article, footer, sidebar { same stuff here }
Do you see where this goes? Now content, presentation, and semantics
are getting all wrapped up, and it becomes difficult to add, change,
remove. Even then, I still can't convey much information. Look at:
The genus <i>nematoda</i> has ugly species, especially when they are
viewed with <i>x-ray</i> machines.
Not the best example, but you can see that the distinction between the
first <i> being a taxonomical definition and the second being a
technical term is not made.
If you want to see what a proper separation of semantics and
presentation looks like, it's:
<div title="header"></div>
<div title="navigation"></div>
<div title="article"></div>
<div title="footer"></div>
where id, class, rel, etc. could be used in place of title, and
section could be used instead of div. Also consider:
The genus <span title="taxonomy">nematoda</span> has ugly species,
especially when they are viewed with <span
title="technical">x-ray</span> machines.
Whatever we use, the point is that it's easy to go into an already
constructed HTML4 or XHTML document and add semantics to it (when the
presentation and semantics are separate), without having to mess much
with the CSS [1], or wait for tags to be introduced. This kind of
thing isn't supported by machines yet, but I would much rather prefer
to see support for attribute-defined semantics [2], than trying to
modify/add presentational elements that are semantic.
Excuse the long e-mail, and especially excuse me if I'm off on
anything here, I'm not an XML expert. I hope that I've managed to
explain my point (xml is better than html, semantics belong in
attributes) without butchering any facts.
[1] Especially considering we can do this:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#attribute-selectors
which makes it easy to style all divs / spans with the same title.
[2] Just peruse all the examples at http://www.microformats.org/wiki/
and imagine trying to make an html tag for every single one.
--
--
Christian Montoya
christianmontoya.com ... rdpdesign.com ... cssliquid.com
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