Re: Fw: Disturbing trend in tables

At 06:09 AM 1/20/2001 , David Woolley wrote:
> > wasn't clear what you were advocating on that issue. It's not too long ago
> > that we all learned to use B, I and U ... now you want to change those easy
>
>I think they have been discouraged from at least HTML version 2, so
>anyone teaching them as preferred methods less than about six or seven
>years ago was teaching obsolete information.

I'm not sure I understand.  If I wanted to make something underlined,
italic, or bold 6 years ago, David, what code was I supposed to
use?  Surely you're not suggesting I should have been using CSS
back in 1994?

Remember that bold does not mean the same thing as strong, italics
do not mean the same thing as emphasis.  The range of possible cases
in which you would want to make something bold is larger than the
sum of cases covered by presentational markup in HTML (2, 3.2, 4, X1)
which makes something bold.  The same applies to italics, etc.

Which means, for example, that if I wanted to list the scientific
name for a species of fish back in 1994, I could not simply use
<cite> or <em> or any other _semantic_ tag because that would be
a misuse of the semantic element.  Therefore, I was forced to use
<i>scientificus nameus</i> because of limitations in HTML (and
because CSS didn't exist).

Someone who was taught to use <i> back in 1994 or 1995 was not
taught "obsolete" information -- this is simply historical
revisionism!  Now, if you were taught to use <i> when you meant
<em>, that would be wrong -- but so is teaching people to use <em>
when you mean <i>!

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                http://kynn.com/
Technical Developer Relations, Reef           http://www.reef.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://idyllmtn.com/
Contributor, Special Ed. Using XHTML     http://kynn.com/+seuxhtml
Unofficial Section 508 Checklist       http://kynn.com/+section508

Received on Saturday, 20 January 2001 12:18:08 UTC