Re: web standards project article

Le jeu 28/10/2004 à 10:58, Ant Tears a écrit :
>  So semantic markup is an implied goal, not even a measure of
> compliance, and something we are trying still to understand. Semantic
> markup is a best practice, not an explicit recommendation.

Indeed, semantics are not measured in terms of conformance; the same way
that saying "Dogs fly" cannot be sanctioned as being a grammatically
incorrect sentence, nor even an illogical sentence. It just doesn't
match the reality as we (or at least I) know it.

The same way, marking up a text with semantics-loaded tags is equivalent
to assessing some semantics on the said text. For instance, using
<blockquote> means that you're making a quotation;
using <blockquote>A small step for me, a huge leap for
humanity</blockquote> assesses that you're making a reference to a
sentence you didn't create. 
Now, using <blockquote> e.g. for indentation only means that you're
assessing something false about the text you're marking up, the same way
asserting that dogs fly is not formally incorrect, it's simply not the
reality.

Pushing this a bit further, one could imagine that you don't claim by
default any IPR on texts put inside a <blockquote> element; if you used
it for presentation purposes rather than with semantics in mind, one
could argue that by doing so, you've failed to claim to be the author of
the given text. 
Conversely, if you do use <blockquote> around texts that you've copied
from another document (and within the limits permitted by law), you are
more likely to be able to say that you were indeed doing quotations
(rather than plagiarism) than if not.
(I'm not claiming that any law court would take these in consideration
if a case around this topic arises; I'm just trying to illustrate that
the consequences of mis-using semantics are not in the domain of respect
of the technology, but of respect to the receivers of the technology).

Dom
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org