Question

What's the most lightweight, semantic, 开发者_运维问答and over-all best way of referencing snippets of code within XHTML 1.1?

Claim

Snippets of code within HTML are not semantically proper. Snippets (ideally) would only be referenced or linked (using <object>, <a>, etc.), not embedded, escaped, and styled in full.

Rationale

• Let browsers render code snippets
  • Having many custom server-side implementations tells me it should be standardized
  • Browsers can have plug-ins for copy+paste, download, etc.
    • Seems to me this is where it belongs (not in Javascript)
• Why not use <code>
  • Escaped code is ugly
  • We render it for the client
  • No semantic representation of the language itself (MIME type would be nice)
• Javascript is functionality, not presentation.
  • Syntax needs to be portable (i.e. no proprietary functionality)
  • No need for hacked-together solutions

Illustration

Resource      Tag    Actual resource              Alternative format
Image         img    An image located on server   `alt` attribute
Source code   ?      A file containing code       `code` tag? `a` link?

Example solution

code_sample.php is in the same directory as an HTML page containing the following:

<a href="code_sample.php" type="text/x-php">
  Example of widget creation
</a>

• Pros
  • Semantically uses title to describe the source code being referenced
  • Degradation: non-compliant browsers render a link to the associated content
  • Also, LinkType seems like a potentially good attribute for specifying "Code Snippet"
    • http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/abstraction.html#dt_LinkTypes
• Cons
  • Not semantic enough? Seems wrong to replace hyperlinks with source code for presentation
  • <object> might be better, but wouldn't degrade as nicely.

What's the most lightweight, semantic, and over-all best way of referencing snippets of code within XHTML 1.1?