Re: CLASS attribute (Was: No IMG in FIG)

Joe English (jenglish@crl.com)
Fri, 04 Aug 1995 12:16:55 -0700


michaelj@relay.relay.com (Michael Johnson) wrote:

> Joe English wrote:
> >michaelj@relay.relay.com (Michael Johnson) wrote:
> >> I do not think that Dav
> >> intended CLASS to be used to dynamically define new semantic markup, nor d
> >> think it would be a good idea to use it for this.
> >
> >Actually, that's precisely what CLASS was designed for.
>
> Can you provide references that show that this was the designer's intent?

No. I've looked. Every mention of the "CLASS" attribute I've been able
to find in any archive only mentions its use as a stylesheet hook.
(except maybe for
<URL:http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/divisions.html>
which uses <DIV CLASS=APPENDIX> in an example).

The %cextra; and %pextra; extension parameters were
present in the 5-Apr-1994 HTML+ DTD and disappeared sometime
between then and the 9-Feb-1995 HTML 3 draft; the universal
CLASS attribute was not in that draft.

I was mistaken: user-defined semantic extensions appear not to have
been the motivation behind CLASS and it is intended only for
stylesheet processing.

--jenglish@crl.com