Attribute references

[Lou Quillio]

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Michel Fortin wrote:
> Le 9 janv. 2005, à 13:19, John Gruber a écrit :
> 
>> One advantage of this is that for something like classes, you can
>> define one class attribute defintion, and reuse it on as many
>> elements as you need.
> 
> I see this as a reference to a reference.

Agree.  There's no advantage, and readability disadvantages.

>     ![image](sourceURL){#my-image .my-class width="30" height="30"}

A bit long, n'est-ce pas?  Still, it's very flexible, and images are a
special case:  there's no expectation that they're viewable in the
source.  And most often you'd do something like

    ![alt text](path/to/image){.right}

which is pretty clean.  But wait.  Who needs the special alt text syntax
when there's a general attribute syntax?

    !(path/to/image){.right alt="alt text"}

So if you go Michel's way, the possible refinements are confined to
providing a shorthand for the commonest, most valuable "discretionary"
attributes -- to avoid visual noise.  For images there are four:  alt,
class, width, height

    !(path/to/image){[alt text] 176/80 .right}

    <img src="path/to/image" alt="alt text" width="176" height="80"
class="right" />

That handles almost anything you'd want to do with an image, and is
consistent with proposed inline class and id syntax:

    This is a special paragraph. {.special}

The only difference is some special shorthand for the required alt
attribute and the desirable width and height attributes.

LQ
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