Re: Sentence MarkUp

Scott E. Preece (preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com)
Thu, 27 Jul 1995 15:54:35 -0500

From: Joe English <joe@trystero.art.com>
| > I think that it would be premature to standardize CLASSes until we see what
| > people want to do with them.
|
| Which is precisely the right thing to do, IMO.
|
| I believe that CLASSes should *never* be standardized
| in the sense that you describe, i.e., such that a browser
| would give elements special treatment based on CLASS
| attribute values without an explicit instruction from
| the author.
|
| Authors must be free to use whatever CLASS names they
| come up with without fear that Somebody Else's Browser
| might do something unexpected with their document.
---


I don't see any reason there shouldn't be standard CLASSes, especially
if people want to move some of the current elements into CLASSes.
Just as Ansi C and Posix specify namespace rules, there should be rules
governing what CLASS names are reserved to authors, what names are
reserved to vendors, and what names are reserved to the standard.
It's the only way to manage an extensible namespace without having a
registering organization.


For instance, if you say CLASS names beginning with '_' are reserved to
the standard, and names beginning with alphanumeric characters
[a-zA-Z0-9] are reserved to document authors, and names beginning with
'@'are reserved to the organization whose Internet domain matches the
prefix of the CLASS up to the next '@', you shouldn't have to worry
about conflicts.  I don't necessarily recommend those particular rules,
but they illustrate the approach.


scott



--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
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