After a quite long IRC chat with fantasai and Ian Hickson, I finally see some interest in the l element.

Well, not really, since I still think ol/li and div are enough, but I can live with it :-)

I think the WD introduced a very big confusion speaking of lines: the l element represents, I quote the WD, "a single line of text". Some people read this line as "line of poetry" or "line of program", some others read it as "visual line".

So a line (l element) is not a line (of poetry) is not a line (well, a line).

I strongly recommend (a) a clarification of the definition of the l element (b) another name, this one being too confusing with 1 and i, and intrinsicly too confusing because a "line" has multiple meanings in English having different visual rendering (and that's not the case in other languages).

This element meant to serve as a replacement for <br/>, I still think it will too drastically complexify wysiwyg editors. I still totally disagree with the removal of <br/>.

Don't miss Arte tv channel tonight, they'll show a remarkable documentary about the CIA.

I have redesigned the Glazblog. There are some differences between Gecko-based browsers, Opera, MSIE and MacIE mostly because only Gecko is smart enough to handle CSS based menus.

It's sunny, warm, and I enjoyed my Honda NTV 650cc today. It really does not seem to be a bad day. Unfortunately, it is. A very bad one, indeed.

Through boing boing blog, I found this ad on www.sunday.com:

1. It is a presentational element, it represents nothing but a line. A line is defined by its rendering and nothing else. From that point of view, it's not less presentational that the <br> element,
2. The name of the element is terrible. Will lead to confusion between l, 1 and i,
3. It is useful only when you have a list of adjacent lines. So it's basically  a list (ul or ol) with list items (li) having no marker and no wrapping,
4. Using ul/ol/li instead of l makes it much easier to number lines since you have a known container to reset the numbering in CSS.

This has been sent to www-html@w3.org and www-html-editor@w3.org

0. the lack of DTD is a very big problem. The HTML WG should not release other XHTML WD without DTD.
1. the head element should not exist any more. It's a useless container for metadata.
2. the body element should not exist any more. It's a useless container for data since we already have the root of the document.
3. the xml-stylesheet PI and the link element are conflicting
4. the link element and the src attribute on the style element are conflicting
5. metadata meta elements are only allowed at document's level but can't be scoped on a per-element basis
6. stylesheets can't be scoped on a per-element basis
7. deprecating h1-h6 is a performance hit for web browsers. If the h element is introduced with the section element, a default stylesheet for XHTML 2.0 will need

        section > h                    { ... }
        section > section >h           { ... }
        section > section > section > h { ... }
        ...

   and that's _considerably_ slower than

        h1 { ... }
        ...
        h6 { ... }

   More generally, I am under the impression that browser performance has not been taken under consideration for the design of XHTML 2.0.

8. I do not understand how the DTD will reflect the modularization
9. the definition of deprecated is not normative
10. the title attribute has a special meaning for the link element and therefore cannot serve as an extra advisory information. Title and alternate style set should be independent.
11. the notion of linguistic root of a word added as a note here seems to me completely crazy.
12. the definition of the dir attribute is exactly what I called in my previous messages a normative definition of an xhtml attribute using a css redundancy. If it can be done there, it can be done elsewhere. For example the edit attribute where the prose assigns the default rendering 'display: none' to 'edit="deleted"'.
13. by the way, that default rendering of 'display: none' for 'edit="deleted"' is valid only for browsing environments. In an editing environment, the default rendering of 'edit="deleted"' would probably be 'text-decoration: line-through; color: red' or something equivalent.
14. the Datetime format is not defined in the WD
15. the definition of the href attribute does not say what means 'activated'
16. how can be specified the language of an object designated by a cite attribute ?
17. I don't understand why access-key is in XHTML2. In the XHTML2 spirit as described in the introduction of the document, it should not be here. Furthermore, system-dependant and language-dependant common practices make this completely unusable.
18. the navindex attribute seems to me the worst choice of all for that feature. Having this defined by an integer is a design mistake in a structured XML-based world. This should be defined by ID and an IDREF:

    <table>
    <tr><td href="a" nextlink="link2">NW</td>
    <td href="c" id="link3" nextlink="link4">NE</td></tr>
    <tr><td href="b" id="link2" nextlink="link3">SW</td>
    <td href="d" id="link4">SE</td></tr>
    </table>

19. as I said above in item 4, the src attribute conflicts with other element.
20. I find the nl element useless.
21. the duplication of the title element is a closed issue if the head and body elements are removed (see items 1 and 2 above)
22. I am still completely opposed to the l element. The manipulation of this element in wysiwyg editors will be too hard in comparison with the existing <br> in HTML4. If you really want to extract presentation from the markup here, use a processing instruction <?line-break?> instead of <br>.
23. don't introduce the nr element, reuse MathML if that's really needed.
24. the address element should be improved, I agree. But not using the l element has it has often been proposed. That's not enough.
25. the cite element is not needed, it is redundant with an anchor having something like rel=cite (for instance).
26. removing the hr element is counter-productive; renaming it is useless, keep it simple and stupid.
27. the modification of the model of the paragraph p element will drastically impact editing environements. Most editors rely on the inline/block discrimination to handle user input, in particular when the user presses the Enter key. I see this change as a nice structural change, unfortunately totally overkill for vendors. You can't say at the same time "XHTML 2.0 will be edited by tools and not by hand" and complexify that way the language so that editors will hardly handle it.
28. in the spirit of XHTML 2.0, the pre element should not exist. The non-collapsable spaces should be &nbsp; and the lines should be materialized by <br> or <l> element. I am, as I said above, completely opposed to <l> and I am in favor of keeping <pre>.
29. if an element carries both the href attribute and the cite attribute, how can the link to the cite URI be activated?
30. an h element child of the body is redundant with a title element child of body as in item 21.
31. sub and sup elements are purely presentational and do not carry any semantics
32. the a element is useless since any element can carry an href attribute.
33. if the a element is preserved, it should not serve as source AND target of a link. Named anchors should be removed from the spec and only an ID should allow to target an element using an URL with a fragment id.
34. the label element should be called title and should be allowed in ul/ol/dl. I already said that I find nl useless.
35. the lack of the value and start attributes on ol and li elements are a major mistake extensively discussed in www-style@w3.org.
36. section 15.2.4 is just a denial of the progressive rendering... Does the HTML WG really think that browsers are not going to start rendering very long documents if the network makes the retrieval too long from a user's perspective? This parargraph seems to me unapplicable in dynamic environments.
37. just for the record, the lack of style attribute is a major error, recently fixed by the HTML and the CSS WG jointly.
38. the style and link elements still lack a disabled attribute. Please note that this attribute **is** in DOM Level 2 Style.
39. the removal of the "_blank" value for the target attribute seems to me an error.
40. why isn't XFrames merged with XHTML 2.0 ?
41. I still think that the removal of B, I and U is a major error for the Web. One may want to annotate visually a document without adding any semantic.

References:

• [0] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#a_xhtml20_dtd_issue_0
• [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_7.2.
• [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_7.4.
• [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#styleSheet_external
• [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_12.1.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#adef_attribute-collections_src
• [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_13.1.
• [6] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_styleSheetmodule
• [7] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_textmodule_issue_4
  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#edef_text_h
• [9] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#a_terms
• [10] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Core
• [11] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_attribute-collectionsmodule_issue_0
• [12] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Bi-directional
  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Edit
• [13] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Edit
• [14] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Edit
• [15] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Hypertext
• [16] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Hypertext
• [17] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Hypertext
• [18] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Hypertext
• [19] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Embedding
• [20] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_10.2.
• [21] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_structuremodule_issue_2
• [22] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.12.
• [23] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_textmodule_issue_2
• [24] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.2.
• [25] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.4.
• [26] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_textmodule_issue_5
• [27] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.13.
• [28] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.14.
• [29] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Hypertext
• [30] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#edef_text_h
• [31] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.20.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_8.21.
• [32] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_9.1.
• [33] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_9.1.
• [34] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_10.5.
• [35] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#s_listmodule
• [36] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_15.2.4.
• [38] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_16.1.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#sec_12.1.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Style/stylesheets.html#StyleSheets-StyleSheet
• [39] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/xhtml2.html#col_Hypertext
• [40] http://www.w3.org/TR/xframes/

42 (bad permalinks), Dylan Schiemann (no permalink), Conforme, Dreams4Net, Karl Dubost, Karl Dubost (2),

Bush has declared today "Freedom is beautiful". I wonder if he applied s/French/Freedom/g before saying that :-)

Si mes souvenirs sont bons, silicon.fr c'était un des webzines de la néo-économie des plus minables. Ils racontaient n'importe quoi, et leurs analyses étaient minables. Après avoir fait leurs adieux à la scène, ils reviennent. *sigh* Dans l'hyperespace, personne ne vous entend crier.

A neighbour of mine thinks that the SARS epidemy is more or less something not very important that the journalists make important to have something to talk about, besides Iraq... Well, let's think about it. Its global lethality is about 10% and its specific lethality among doctors and nurses reaches 30% in some places. It has reached Africa and Japan. Airports are now dangerous places, where just crossing the path of someone coming from an infected place and breathing the same air can kill. A lot of doctors here in France, and in particular the ones who survived the outbreak in Hanoï, think it will reach Western Europe. The only good thing is that they think the epidemy could stop with the end of winter, giving us time to produce a vaccine before next winter.

Do you know the famous word by Benjamin Disraeli, answering to an antisemitic attack at the british parliament? "Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.".

Well... When the ancestors of Disraeli (and mine) were brutal savages in an unknown place, Mesopotamia had already given the "Epic of Gilgamesh" to the world.

Last thing, in the Basrah district, Iraqis are building community houses in reed. The model of house they build is more than 4000 years old. Described on ancient tablets. They still use it.