On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Alan Trick wrote:

> When we add more terms
> (elements, attributes, etc) we make the language more difficult

Undoubtedly. Trivial languages like XML (as such) are so tempting since 
they leave the real problems to others.

> - both for the authours (the webmasters who have to know HTML)

You don't need to know elements that you don't have use for.

> and the readers
> (the browsers and bots who have to implement the stuff).

That's just browsers, not "readers" in general. The proposed element
would have semantics that browsers _need_ to observe. It's a bit more
complicated question whether indexing robots should observe it too.
But _users_ need not worry, except that they would need to learn _one_ 
mechanism to reveal the "hidden" content, instead of zillions of methods 
that pages do in the absence of a general markup element.

> In my oppinion
> this is not a generic enough element to be useful.

Au contraire. As described, it is probably _too_ generic, but this
could be fixed.

> Try using a deffinition list with the class of 'spoiler', and then style
> it CSS and add javascript that will do what you want.

This is a good example where we get when we have too trivial a markup 
language. We have varying (and usually poor-quality) homebrew techniques 
to implement a simple thing, perhaps abusing markup (e.g., definition list 
for something that is not a list of definitions), using client-side 
scripting which might be switched off in browsers, and using CSS for 
essential division of content to displayed and non-displayed, instead of 
using CSS for its intended purposes: optional suggestions on presentation.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/