o, having been critical of current efforts, do I have any practical suggestions on how to solve this problem? Well, I have the start of one.If adding elements to HTML is out of the question, at least within the parameters of this discussion, attributes are the other logical area of HTML to concentrate on. After all, for nearly a decade, we’ve been using class and id attributes as mechanisms to extend the semantics of HTML.
A great many developers are familiar and comfortable with this. The microformats project demonstrated that the existing attributes of HTML are not sufficient, as a generalized mechanism, to extend the semantics of HTML. So, if we are to use attributes to help solve this problem, we need to come up with one or more new attributes. Before we get into the mechanics of how that might work, it’s only fair to subject this suggestion to the same requirements we have for the new elements of HTML 5. Most importantly, is introducing new attributes to HTML backward compatible? And if so, does it provide a workable mechanism for semantic extensibility in HTML?
Let’s invent a new attribute. I’ll call it “structure,” but the particular name isn’t important. We can use it like this:
<div structure=“header”>
Let’s see how our browsers fare with this.Of course, all our browsers will style this element with CSS.
div {color: red}
But how about this?
div[structure] {font-weight: bold}
In fact, almost all browsers, including IE7, style the div with an attribute of structure, even if there is no such thing as the structure attribute! Sadly, our luck runs out there, as IE6 does not. But we can use the attribute in HTML and have all existing browsers recognize it. We can even use CSS to style our HTML using the attribute in all modern browsers. And, if we want a workaround for older browsers, we can add a class value to the element for styling. Compare this with the HTML 5 solution, which adds new elements that cannot be styled in Internet Explorer 6 or 7 and you’ll see that this is definitely a more backward-compatible solution.