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Bug 21572 - The term ‘RCDATA elements’ is obscure; there's no clue in the spec as to why it's called that.
Summary: The term ‘RCDATA elements’ is obscure; there's no clue in the spec as to why ...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-04-03 15:38 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2013-06-11 18:24 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2013-04-03 15:38:04 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/syntax.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#elements-0
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#elements-0

Comment:
The term ‘RCDATA elements’ is obscure; there's no clue in the spec as to
why it's called that.

Posted from: 81.143.60.194
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Comment 1 Smylers 2013-04-03 15:42:51 UTC 
Anne suggested it could be renamed to something more useful: http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20130403#l-689

I'm not sure there's a good term, but it could be less offputtingly jargonny, since there doesn't seem any reason for it to be called RCDATA any more.

(The context was me, as an author, trying to find out why comments aren't allowed inside <title>.)
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-04-04 03:34:29 UTC 
I'm definitely open to changing the term. RCDATA is purely legacy from SGML terminology.

It needs to be something short and unambiguous, though, because it gets used all over the HTML parser spec too.

So for example, these are no good:

   text elements
   text-only elements
    -- these sound too much like "raw text elements, which we're already using"

   no-child elements
   child-free elements
    -- these sound too much like they can't have text node children either

   element-free elements
    -- just too confusing
Comment 3 Simon Pieters 2013-04-08 14:47:38 UTC 
normal text elements
 - In contrast to raw text elements, entities work like normal.

cooked text elements
 - Antonym to raw.
Comment 4 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-04-11 22:34:23 UTC 
"normal <word implying not-normal> foo" is a rather odd construction that would still cause confusion (is it a normal element? what's the text part mean?)

"cooked" usually means something has been done to the raw string to get it into an intermediate state. I don't think that applies here.
Comment 5 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-05-31 20:54:59 UTC 
GPHemsley suggested "escapable raw text", which is the least bad so far. :-)
Comment 6 Simon Pieters 2013-06-01 09:34:18 UTC 
WFM
Comment 7 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2013-06-11 18:24:20 UTC 
Done and done.
Comment 8 contributor 2013-06-11 18:24:59 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r7953.
Check-in comment: Move away from the term 'RCDATA' in the syntax section. (I haven't changed the parser section, so that people who have implemented it don't get really confused.)
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=7952&to=7953