Attribute references

[Jelks Cabaniss]

Joshua Cook wrote:
> Sounds like you've never visted the CSS Zen Garden.  What if your
> document will be displayed, unmodified, on a normal computer monitor
> and a small handheld screen?  What will the handheld user see when you
> document contains an image with width="480" and height="360"?  Would
> it not be better to serve this user an alternate CSS file with more
> reasonable dimensions for their screen?

Height and width attributes, expressed in pixels, are just metadata about
the image.  Your 480x360 example is still 480x360, no matter whether you're
using a postage-stamp sized device, a 12" 72dpi screen, a 21" 300dpi screen,
or what have you.  Those attributes may or may not be useful to you, your
editing software, or a rendering engine.  If they aren't useful to you, they
certainly aren't required, so don't use them.

> To be clear, I'm talking about limiting syntax sugar.  I do think it
> should be possible to add any valid attribute to an element, but when
> we are deciding which syntactical sugar to add to Markdown, I
> definitely think that we should be limiting it to the most common
> cases.  My point is that id and class attributes are universally
> applicable to nearly every HTML element, and therefore, are good
> candidates for some shorthand.  The height and width attributes are
> limited to elements like object and img, and furthermore, are
> deprecated in the current HTML spec, as you have pointed out in a
> later message.

Not to necessarily take issue with your main point, but `height` and `width`
are definitely not W3C-deprecated -- they are explicitly enshrined in the
XTHML 1.1 Recommendation.  


/Jelks