Re: Cleaning House

On Thu, 3 May 2007, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

> So how about, right here right now, moving the contentious <b>, <i>, <sub>, 
> <sup> and <small> (did I miss any others?) under the "Presentational markup" 
> section

I think I've seen this before... Those elements have been discussed many, 
many times on different forums. Calling all of them indiscriminately 
"presentational" is gross oversimplification. Surely the difference 
between 3<sup>2</sup> and 32 is not just in visual rendering; it's the 
difference between 9 and 32.

Unfortunately, the discussions seldom go past the point of an incomplete 
statement of the problem. If such issues where presentation and meaning 
are intimately coupled cannot be analyzed and solved properly, it is best 
to allow common presentational markup as currently allowed in HTML, and 
perhaps add a little. Taking it away without adding fairly complex 
semantic markup for all the relevant cases would be a disservice.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2007 20:26:38 UTC