

Re: DogFood (and inline/block constraints)

From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:03:11 GMT
Message-Id: <200712131803.lBDI3BI6011597@edinburgh.nag.co.uk>
To: adam.vandenhoven@gmail.com
Cc: public-html@w3.org

> I'm not convinced that you're right. Math doesn't have to be declared  
> as anything. It is simply a different thing.

but (depending what the final story on compound document types is) it is
usally the job of the outer document type spec to say where, if
anywhere, foreign material is allowed. You are assuming one, very open,
possibilit) Other document types are more constraing.

> probably doesn't).


> and more conventionally written the same paragraph as:
The usage I gave was hardly unconventional, the mathematical literature
is full of documents that have displayed equations mid sentence.

> Both paragraphs are structurally identical and should be marked up the  
> same.

yes exactly!!!! my point (so since you said that you disagreed with
that, you must have missed my point), so I'll give a non-math, non list,

	<p>The subject of this paragraph is <q>horses that rock</q> where  
horses are black things with four legs.</p>

is structurally the same as

	<p>The subject of this paragraph is <blockquote>horses that rock</blockquote> where  
horses are black things with four legs.</p>

and should be marked up the same way, it's just a stylistic choice to
display large quotations. But the latter is invalid so you have to do

	<p>The subject of this paragraph is </p><blockquote>horses that
rock</blockquote><p class="noindent"> where  
horses are black things with four legs.</p>

which looks OK visually but is structurally horrible, or you have to do

	<div>The subject of this paragraph is <blockquote>horses that rock</blockquote> where  
horses are black things with four legs.</div>

which is structurally much cleaner, but proposed to be banned in html5.


> [How to do this for the  html serialization?]].
Now there's a good question....

> Paragraphs are real meaningful semantic entities and they should only  
> allow things who's semantic meaning is consistent with a grammatic  
> paragraph, or rather a sentence (as a paragraph is a collection of  
> sentences). As I think I've demonstrated (and as I'm sure at least all  
> native english speakers have learned in grade school) you can have a  
> list in a sentence (I like apples, pears and carrots.) suggesting that  
> lists (ordered, unordered, perhaps definition?) should be allowed in  
> paragraphs,

that was _exactly_ my argument, but it's been strongly stated that
existing legacy parser deployment mean that there is no way to
change the fact that you can't have block level elements inside a <p.>
in text/html and doing it hust for text/xhtml+xml seems too confusing.

So you have to look for something else.

> Divs are meaningless semantic entities as such there is no need to be  
> picky. The only thing I think is important is that authors must not  
> mix inline with block level elements. That is just semantically  
> confusing, IMHO.

but mixing inline and block level elements is exactly what you need to
do do model a list inside a sentence. Also this has been allowed (and
used) since whenever div was added to html (was it 3.2 or earlier?)
so it's not at all clear that it's advisable to change this now even if
that was thought desirable.


The Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd is a company registered in England
and Wales with company number 1249803. The registered office is:

powered by MessageLabs. 
Received on Thursday, 13 December 2007 18:03:31 GMT
