Re: Thoughts on CLASS and ROLE attributes in HTML 3 draft

Joe English (joe@trystero.art.com)
Thu, 16 Mar 1995 13:31:35 PST

Dave Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com> wrote:

> I am still uncertain as to whether the Netscape NOBR and WBR tags should
> be added to HTML 3.0 or not. These provide an alternative approach to
> use of &nbsp; and the nowrap attribute. What do people think?

<WBR> would be better represented as an entity than an element,
if it's even necessary. If it is necessary, something like TeX's
"discretionaries" [*] would be better. <NOBR>, or a "NOBR" attribute
on phrase-level elements, might be useful, but I don't think this level
of hyphenation control is all that critical.

I'd say <NOBR> and <WBR> aren't needed.

> re the RANGE widget for fill out forms:
> > I would like to see that broken out into <input type=range min=1 max=10>
>
> I decided against this to keep a reasonable bound on the number of
> attributes for the INPUT tag. Perhaps we ought to consider breaking
> INPUT into a number of different tags?

Yes! That's a very good idea. <INPUT> is too overloaded.

At one point, the HTML 3 DTD didn't use inclusion exceptions
for <INPUT>, <SELECT>, and <TEXTAREA> elements either; I thought
that was a good idea too. (It made those elements legal outside
of <FORM>s, but it made the content model *inside* forms much
cleaner, I thought.)

> >> 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.
>
> The way I heard it, was that most people didn't understand the concept
> or couldn't see the value it adds. I therefore decided to move it to
> the other side of the chop line in the interest of getting a 3.0 spec
> out in a reasonable time.

Hmm... I think it would be valuable enough to the people
who *do* understand the concept to put it back in. It can
save a lot of effort when pages move, and is a powerful
organization tool.

--Joe English

jenglish@crl.com

[*] Re: TeX "discretionaries": these have three subparts: the pre-break
part, the post-break part, and the no-break part. The no-break part is
used if the line is not broken at that point in the line, and the pre-
and post- break parts are put at the end of the line and the beginning
of the next line, respectively, if a line break does occur there.
They're powerful enough to handle things like German hyphenation,
where words can change spelling when hyphenated.