Robert wrote:
As I followed the thread, thinking about styling the element was the
clincher for me. IE 6 doesn't support attribute based selectors. So, I,
for one, couldn't use it until IE 6 (haven't tested attribute selectors in
IE 7, since I stopped using them in light of IE 6) lost most of it's
popularity.
The ease of using DOM methods to find tags, as opposed to attributes, tends
to suggest that all things having href's should be easily findable by
script. <a> works nicely for that, but would the availability of a
document.links array then include all things with href's?
Tags are rather like nouns while attributes are rather like adjectives.
Though those linguistic functions themselves are sometimes fluid.
A red circle -- A circular redness
There are known cross-cultural differences in which attributes define
things, as for sorting. Navajo children, as I recall are more likely to sort
by shape than Anglo-Americans. (Castaneda did some studies I think in the
1960's). I do remember finding some of the part-of-speech distinctions in
Navajo as counterintuitive.
Existing cultural relativity would tend to suggest no easy way of resolving
the issue from a "cognitive" perspective.
It would seem then, best, in this case to default to the status quo.
ddailey
