On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Mark Birbeck wrote:

> On the *semantic* side of this, the purpose of @role is to provide features
> that may be an absolute necessity in one domain but completely irrelevant in
> another. So rather than having to fight over them on the list all the time,
> each sphere that is using XHTML 2 can add whatever they like. :)

It sounds like you're saying, in effect, that the role attribute is 
included since it helps to avoid discussing and solving problems.

I fail to see the difference between that and saying that everyone and 
each "domain" (area of application) can use extra attributes and tags
to supplement the XHTML soup. Well, there is a formal difference, and
a technical difference too.

To apply similar strategy to _elements_, we could add, say, the
<dwim> element in XHTML 2.0, with a required attribute 'means'
which contains the semantics in some formalism. Oops, we already
have <span> and <div>, and 'role' is shorter than 'means' (so let's
ignore its obscurity).

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