Skip to content

[editorial] Clarify what "palpable content" is. #24

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Closed
wants to merge 1 commit into from
Closed

[editorial] Clarify what "palpable content" is. #24

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
6 changes: 6 additions & 0 deletions source
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -10236,6 +10236,12 @@ http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3C%21DOCTYPE%20HTML%3E%0
data-x="concept-html-contents">contents</span> that is <dfn>palpable content</dfn> and that does
not have the <code data-x="attr-hidden">hidden</code> attribute specified.</p>

<p class="note"><span>Palpable content</span> makes an element non-empty by providing either
some descendant non-empty <span data-x="text content">text</span>, or else something users can
hear (<code>audio</code> elements) or view (<code>video</code> or <code>img</code> or
<code>canvas</code> elements) or otherwise interact with (for example, interactive form
controls).</p>

<p>This requirement is not a hard requirement, however, as there are many cases where an element
can be empty legitimately, for example when it is used as a placeholder which will later be filled
in by a script, or when the element is part of a template and would on most pages be filled in but
Copy link

@darobin darobin Aug 28, 2015

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Since this is a note, you don't need to make use of precise wording as you would in normative text. If your goal is to make this clear to regular users of the validator, I would recommend not using Text ("Why is it titlecased? Does this mean something special?") or inter-element whitespace ("Inter-what what?"). Mentioning descendants might already over-technicalise it. Maybe something along the lines that it must contain user-oriented content such as actually readable text, graphics, video, audio, or something that users can interact with such as form controls.

Copy link
Member

@annevk annevk Aug 28, 2015

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I disagree somewhat with that. Notes still need to be accurate. Also, the motivation behind adding this note is for those actually trying to understand the subject matter.

Copy link
Member

@domenic domenic Aug 28, 2015

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I think the last sentence did get quite long, and I think it has unbalanced parenthesis. I'm not opposed to the level of detail but do rephrase it a bit to break up the long sentence. (One way to do that would be to remove detail.)

Also, Text should not be capitalized. The only reason it is capitalized in its definition is because it starts the sentence. See e.g. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#palpable-content:text-content for a lowercase usage.

Expand Down