


From: Ben Boyle <benjamins.boyle@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2007 20:42:11 +1000
Message-ID: <5f37426b0707030342r5e75ef7fo9db0f7c4debfb4cf@mail.gmail.com>
To: "Charles McCathieNevile" <chaals@opera.com>
Cc: "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch>, "Andrew Ramsden" <andrew@irama.org>, "Andrew Sidwell" <takkaria@gmail.com>, "aurélien levy" <aurelien.levy@free.fr>, public-html@w3.org

On 7/3/07, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> Because it means they have to write their own microparser to actually
> interpret those semantics, ...

Yeah... with all the add-ons and scripting libraries and restful web
apps stuff that is happening, we need HTML to be as straightforward as
possible. It needs to be easy to learn and easy to use, and the
semantic relationships need to be clearly exposed.

DT/DD has always stuck out like a bit of a sore thumb. it's just
different to how most elements work. I mentioned TBODY as a analogy to
DI, you can use it or not use it. It exposes the semantics in an
explicit way. It's easier to write a script to sort a table (without
mixing up the column headers) when you have a tbody to work with. You
*can* get by without tbody, but it's nice to make it easier when you
can. Sometimes we can use this as a nudge to encourage better coding
(e.g. use of tbody) from authors.

I trust the big guys (browsers) to deal with language nuances like
this, but it really increases the complexity for the little players. I
don't even know if "little players" is the right term for microformats
and add-on developers... add them all up and that represents a lot of
value on the web.

HTML needs to encourage this kind of evolution :)

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 10:42:19 UTC
