[webkit-dev] HTML attributes and tags - slight tweak

[Maciej Stachowiak]

Hi Everyone,

Dave Hyatt's recent code QualifiedName changes were a much-needed  
code cleanup and structural improvement. However, as things stand,  
the symbolic names used for specific HTML tags and attributes in the  
code have gotten a bit wordy. Compare:

Before:
---------
ID_SPAN
ID_A
ATTR_SRC
ATTR_CLASS

After:
------
HTMLTags::span()
HTMLTags::a()
HTMLAttributes::src()
HTMLAttributes::classAttr()

When you have an if test checking for several of these I think it  
actually starts to hurt legibility a bit. Dave and I discussed ways  
to improve this a bit and here's what we came up with:

* Change the various html name symbols from functions to global  
variables - currently they are just inline functions that return a  
global, which doesn't add much.

* Combine HTMLTags and HTMLAttributes classes into a single HTMLNames  
namespace.

* Suffix all tag names with Tag and all attribute names with Attr

The net result would be that you import the HTMLNames namespace, and  
you can write:

Proposed:
------------
spanTag
aTag
srcAttr
classAttr

Which compares favorably to the old names.

In cases where you might care about more than one markup language's  
set of names you wouldn't import the HTML namespace, and could write  
them fully qualified, e.g. HTMLNames::spanTag.

One possible variant is to just call the namespace HTML, so in the  
fully qualified case you could just write HTML::spanTag. The tradeoff  
is that people might expect the namespace to contain more than just  
the names in that case, they might expect it to contain the whole  
HTML DOM, which it wouldn't.

Anyway, I wanted to send this out to see if anyone has comments  
before I make the change, so we can avoid too much thrashing back and  
forth on the names.

Regards,
Maciej