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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 06:21:41 -0600
From: Moshe Yudkowsky <msha4_05@bl.com>
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Subject: Re: Philosophy: Why id but no class?
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Ross Gardler wrote:

 >> Moshe Yudkowsky wrote:
 >>
 >
 >>>> The DTD for documents includes the "id" attribute, but does not allow
 >>>> "class" attributes. I was wondering why this is the case; I'd think
 >>>> that one is just as "dangerous" to the unity of the UI as the other,
 >>>> and certainly I know I find find class important for certain table I
 >>>> have in mind.
 >
 >>
 >>
 >> A future version of Forrest will be moving to a subset of XHTML2 as the
 >> intermediate format (replacing Document V1.2, which will become a source
 >> format to maintain backward compatability). When this happens we will
 >> have class on all elements.
 >>
 >> In order to facilitate this we are migrating Document 1.2 towards XHTML,
 >> the addition of the class attribute to all elements os one of the things
 >> we have agreed is necessary. Feel free to provide a patch for some or
 >> all elements and skins if you have the itch right now.


Ross, thanks for the details. If I find myself adding classes, which is likely,
or FORM, I will submit a patch.

One obstacle is that even after reading the documentation I have no real feel
for the flow of a document through the system. I deduce that it's along the
lines of document2html.xsl followed by site2xhtml.xsl, but I deduce that
there's other steps. To the best of my knownledge there's no flow chart/figure
that captures the entire process. And depsite a bit of fiddling around I have
no idea of how to capture an intermediate document to examine it.

In other words, I have very nice "clean" templates and skin right now that
works very well to produce a pure CSS-based site. However, if I want to modify
the DTD to include "class," I need to know more about the intermediate
transformations. While I can make very good guesses based on the XSL I see,
it'd be nice to have tools to examine the intermediate file formats.
(Documentation would also be good!)

-- 
  Moshe Yudkowsky
  Disaggregate
  2952 W Fargo
  Chicago, IL 60645 USA

  <http://www.Disaggregate.com>