This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 14706 - The plural nature of the name for the <details> tag (the only tag in the spec with a name which takes a plural form) presents a bit of a problem for automation software (such as selenium and watir) which allows the creation of collections of tags with som
Summary: The plural nature of the name for the <details> tag (the only tag in the spec...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-11-06 04:18 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-11-06 10:36 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description contributor 2011-11-06 04:18:41 UTC
Specification: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#top
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#top

Comment:
The plural nature of the name for the <details> tag (the only tag in the spec
with a name which takes a plural form) presents a bit of a problem for
automation software (such as selenium and watir) which allows the creation of
collections of tags with some common attribute.  The convention for this has
been to create such collections via a method with a plurel form of the
normally singular element tag names.

 e.g.
 the method to return a single table row object is .tr, while the method to
return a collection of such objects is .trs.  This paradigm breaks when you
encounter the <details> tag which is already plural, and the english language
has no notion or convention to create a plural form of something that is
already plural.

A minor concern in the grand scheme of things, but still, why have this one
tag name be an exception to the format taken for all the others?   Why not use
<detail> instead?  

Posted from: 76.104.251.42
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2
Comment 1 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-11-06 10:10:03 UTC
detailss
Comment 2 Simon Pieters 2011-11-06 10:36:19 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: We shouldn't base HTML naming decisions on API convensions in watir. (As for what watir should do, I concur with comment 1.)