Re: Thoughts on CLASS and ROLE attributes in HTML 3 draft
Fri, 10 Mar 95 21:48 PST

Peter Flynn writes:
> Joe writes:
> I think it would be a good idea to orthogonalize these attributes;
> that is, leave CLASS attribute values entirely in the user's
> namespace, and use ROLE for everything with predefined semantics.
> How does that sound?
> Pretty good. I've just been thru the DTD in more detail...Dave's done
> his usual excellent job...coupla queries:
> c. lang CDATA "" -- ISO language, country code --
> What ISO # defines these? 3166 is country codes, what is langs?
> Does anyone have a full list they could post or point at?

Definitely would be useful - anyone? I'm going to implement the <lang>
tag that is in there sometime soon, and a list would be most useful.

> g. I'm not familiar with MD5. To me, a "message digest" is something
> like a digested mailing list. Is this intended to hold an
> arbitrarily long string of base64 which the browser will decode and
> display? Where would a user get some text encoded into base64
> without pushing it thru a MIME mailer and snipping it out?

This is a one-way hashing algorithm. Will always be 32 base-64 encoded
chars long. ie:
MD5("foobar") = 3858f62230ac3c915f300c664312c63f

This is to make sure that the referenced document has not changed since
the author made the link.

> l. Does nowrap in <p> effectively imply auto-<br>?

God I hope not. I read it to mean that <p nowrap> is basically a <pre>
segment not in a monospaced font.

> r. Where is this RANGE control implemented? Is SIZE="1,10" meant to
> imply limits:min=1,max=10 ?

Emacs-w3 implements it. SIZE="1,10" implies min=1, max=10. Personally,
I would like to see that broken out into <input type=range min=1 max=10>

> w. BASE has presumably been readmitted to the fold?

What happened to the 'named' base tags from the HTML 3.0 spec that was
distributed at the IETF meetings in San Jose? I thought it was very
useful, and it was trivial to implement.

> x. Do we have real-life examples of META yet?

Other than netscape, no. Emacs-w3 stores them, but doesn't do anything

Good points all, peter, but couldn't you have thought of one more to get
all the way through the alphabet? :)

-Bill P.