About dropping the style attribute

I've realized now that the current spec drops the style attribute for
all elements except for the <font>, but I can't understand the
reasoning behind those decisions.

First the style attribute: yes, by removing it we achieve separation
of content from presentation, but is it realistic to think that the
people will be happy to add a new style to their css every time they
need something different from the rest of the current content?

What about the interaction with javascript?
I understand that it won't longer be possible to use
element.style.property and so this specs ends in a single strike with
all the DHTML.

Then, we got here the font, a hated tag by so many people and it's
kept just to please the WYSIWYG editors, but the only valid attribute
is style.
Wops, that doesn't make sense. WYSIWYG editors use font tags because
that's what IE does generate with the execCommand, but what it does
generate is <font face="Tahoma"> or <font color="#ff0000"> (well, in
uppercase and without quotes, but let's forget that for a moment), it
doesn't understand <font style> so if any editor wants to work the way
proposed in this spec and also being used by IE users, then it will
need to do all the work to format the text, so in the end it can do it
with font or with any other tag, being it for example <span> or
whatever you like.

I see it as an extra burden, as the example [1] shows now instead of
applying the style to the <h1> it is wrapped in an extra tag. And yes,
font might have been chosen so it's backward compatible with the
current browsers, but using a tag named "font" to put a border around
an element looks counter intuitive.

Currently the "universal" tags are div and span, but the way this spec
is written is yelling "put a meta named 'generator', ended with
'(WYSIWYG editor)' and then wrap everything that you need with 'font'
instead of 'div'"

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#the-font

Received on Saturday, 23 June 2007 22:25:44 UTC