

Re: Marking elements as 'volatile'

From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:38:04 +0000 (GMT)
Message-Id: <200501151238.j0FCc4j04150@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
To: www-html@w3.org

> As for people who actually do use XHTML, what is the harm of adding a tag=20
> which adds clear meaning?  I'm yet to hear any arguments against the actual=
> =20
> idea, just noise.

That sort of person tends not to generate the sort of noise in their
markup that needs identifying.  Adverts and visit counts are characteristic
of commercial web sites.

Having said that, I believe that XHTML 2 does, already, include proposals for 
marking off navigation data, which is really a sort of inverse of
primary content.

There has been some topic drift here, in that my original understanding was
that this was about cosmetic content that was volatile, whereas you are
talking more about distinguishing navigation and branding (both of which
can actually be quite static) from content.  I don't have a problem with
categorising material into navigation, content, etc., but I think that has
to go beyond simply identifying content, as, if the rest doesn't matter, 
someone working to the true spirit of HTML wouldn't have included it in the
first place.

I don't see a point in providing a mechanism for marking off visit counts
etc., and again don't think that anyone following the true spirit would
include them, anyway.

The panels model was invented for the commercial market and is a slightly
legitimised version of frames.  Amongst other things, it assumes that 
a web page is part of a relatively small compound document, rather than
part of a huge world wide web.

As I've already said, the semantic way of associating a peer navigation
list would be to use link elements in the header and it should be up to the
browser to make it easy for the user to access this, including, possibly,
automatically displaying it in parallel with current primary page.  Because
it removes an opportunity for branding, I don't see that there will be any
commercial demand for this, so the more commercial browsers won't implement
it, of course.
Received on Saturday, 15 January 2005 12:38:09 GMT
