Attribute references

[european bob]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 13:09 -0500, Joshua Cook wrote:
> I disagree with creating any new shortcut syntax for attributes other
> than class and id.  Images should be given a class or id, then the
> height and width should be specified in CSS.  Specifying the
> dimensions of an image with inline attributes violates the spirit of
> separating content from presentation.

First, I disagree that you can separate content from presentation, or
that in fact you actually want to most of the time.

I don't like your CSS idea, I'm afraid. Specifying image dimensions in
CSS is bad, for a number of reasons:

      * unless you have per-page CSS files, you bloat your site CSS with
        information for *every* page and (in a naive implementation)
        make id site-unique, not page unique
      * if you have control of the document, but not the CSS, you're
        stuffed
      * it requires non-CSS browsers to parse CSS (including: text
        browsers, who are simple, and automatons such as web robots) to
        understand the semantic of the page. 

And there are other good attributes which would be of interest (rel/rev,
for example). Limiting things to id/class isn't really even in the
interest of maintain strict semantic virginity.

--bob.