Re: Proposing <indent> vs. <blockquote>

Mike Schinkel wrote:
>> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/ProposedDesignPrinciples
>> "markup that expresses semantics is usually preferred to purely 
>> presentational markup" -- So you can't deprecate a semantic element 
>> in favor of a presentational one.
> I was not asking to deprecate <blockquote>. It still have significant 
> value.  But it is very often misused simple to gain an indent which is 
> what I was proposing.
>> "HTML Strikes a balance between semantic expressiveness and practical 
>> usefulness." -- Explicitly removing semantics can't be considered as 
>> a balance. (I neither think <indent> would be useful.)
> I wasn't proposing removing semantics. I was proposing adding an 
> element with reduced semantics that could be used when another would 
> often be misused.

I think abuse of blockquote is so deeply engrained that, even if we 
introduced an indent element, it wouldn't be used.  Switching from

    <blockquote><p>My indented paragraph</p></blockquote>

to

    <indent><p>My indented paragraph</p></indent>

is not really much easier or likely than switching to:

    <div style="margin-left: 1em"><p>My indented paragraph</p></div>

or:

    <p style="margin-left: 1em">My indented paragraph</p>

Your indent element is essentially equivalent to the following:

    <style>.indent { margin-left: 1em; }</style>
    <div class="indent">...</div>

In short: IMHO, lazy/ignorant people will still be lazy/ignorant 
regardless of how easy you make this.  It's not exactly complicated at 
the moment!  Indentation is purely presentational (unless you can 
provide a use case where there is semantic meaning to indentation), so 
belongs to CSS.

Bruce Boughton

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2007 02:06:58 UTC