On Sun, Jun 25, 2006 at 06:28:18PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
On 6/25/06, Chad Perrin <perrin(a)apotheon.com>
wrote:
Unnecessary repetition leads to
unmaintainability, because when you need
to change one thing you often end up having to run around changing it in
numerous places, and sometimes people miss things.
But in this case, <poem> adds a class that styles the enclosed text as
a poem. Among other things, this class includes stuff that would be
useful for cooking recipes as well, but that's not all it includes.
What if it turns out people decide, six months down the road, that
poems should all be blockquoted? Then you could just add
"left-margin: 2em;" or whatever to the CSS definition for .class, and
voila, all poems are instantly blockquoted. If people have used it
for hundreds of cooking recipes in the meantime, all of them are going
to be screwed up, unless coincidentally people also want the cooking
recipes to be indented. Users can also provide custom stylesheets, to
which similar reasoning applies. And non-visual Web readers will also
be screwed over.
I'm running out of steam on this discussion, so I'll probably yield the
field after this, but I will say before I go:
I've already pointed out that a "does exactly what we want for thirty
things, but is named for only one, necessitating the creation of
twenty-nine more duplicates on the off-chance we'll change it later"
approach can be avoided for ease of differentiation later by separating
semantics from presentation, and merely linking the two together. Brion
commented with an explanation of what's going on that sounds like it
might actually be taking the approach I favored, and only the initial
statements' description of what the <poem> tags do created a contrary
impression. You seem to think that the behavior assumed in that
contrary impression is a better way to do things, however, and somehow
have chosen to avoid addressing my statements about the manner in which
the same positive effects can be had without the weighty negatives.
Guh. I need a nap.
--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [
http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your
hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." - McCloctnick the Lucid