“Irrelevant” attribute should be renamed

Problem statement / use cases

• while the need to include data in a document that is not for immediate display in the normal flow of the document is important it is a misnomer to call it “irrelevant”
• the name “irrelevant” will confuse authors and is therefore a poor mnemonic for the semantics the attribute conveys

Proposed solutions

Rename this attribute someting like “declared” or “decl” or something along those lines. This will indicate that the data is not irrelevant, but is simply declarative for use in the document in ways other than in the normal flow of the document. CSS can use an attribute selector on the “decl” attribute to set any such elements to display: none; or visisbility: hidden by default. Depending on the element type, UAs might make this information available in ways other than the rendering of the element in the normal flow of the document. Similarly authors might make use of DOM scripting to expose the declared data to users in other ways.

Discussion and evaluation

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See also