Re: WD-xhtml2-20021211 comments

The following text was discovered Thursday 12 December 2002 in a note
attributed to one "John Lewis <lewi0371@mrs.umn.edu>":

> I can't find any mention of the cite element. Has it been removed (and
> if so, why)? Is there, or will there be, a replacement?

I use <cite> pretty frequently, so I really hope it's not going away. And if
it is, what is it going away in favor of? (I tend to use it as a catch-all
element for anything that comes from some other source, whether that be a
magazine title or the thoughts of a character in a story (as opposed to
<q>).)

> Why get rid of strong:
><snip>
> 2. Equally, the meaning of strong inside strong or strong inside em or
>    em inside strong can be sufficiently expressed with multiple em
>    elements--*very little*, if any, information is lost. For example,
>    take this:
>      <em>emphasised <strong>strongly emphasised inside
>      emphasised</strong></em>
>    and this:
>      <strong>strongly emphasised <em>emphasised within strongly
>      emphasised</em></strong>

This example almost doesn't make sense to me. *Why* would you want to do
such a thing?

(Of course, I never did understand why people wanted to use <strong> in the
first place, aside from some misguided belief that it was somehow "better
than <b>".)

>    You don't lose anything with this:
>      <em>emphasised <em><em>strongly emphasised inside
>      emphasised</em></em></em>

This would make more sense to me as:
<em>emphasised <em>strongly emphasised inside emphasised</em></em>

The text within the second <em> gets double emphasis (it would inherit the
first emphasis from its parent <em>) that way.

>    and the same with this, in the second example:
>      <em><em>strongly emphasised <em>emphasised within strongly
>      emphasised</em></em></em>

See previous comment on the original example. This looks a little ugly, but
if you want to put that much emphasis on something, it would be ugly
anyways. :)

>    Getting rid of strong doesn't reduce the ability to style text. It
>    makes everything simpler, if not as intuitive--though XHTML 2.0
>    isn't very intuitive either. (If strong is removed, it would
>    probably be helpful to say that two em elements are recommended in
>    place of one strong element--ditto if it's deprecated.)

CSS styling rules can easily handle child elements. Why not use that?

> Why get rid of the numbered headings:
> <snip>

I agree. h1-h6 should die. Should have died a long time ago.

> Why get rid of hr:
> 1. Its need is dubious considering the new section element (in
>    conjunction with borders). I admit there are situations where it
>    could possibly be useful, but I don't think such situations
>    constitute a *need* for hr. I may be wrong.

See the previous debate on <hr>, current CSS capabilities vis a vis width of
borders vs. width of the rest of the element, et cetera. I admit that this
makes for a rather poor reason for keeping <hr>, but given that any
workaround with <span>, <section> or <div> would be even Less helpful for
HTML 3.2 agents (which know about <hr>, but not about other elements styled
to achieve the same visual effect), I kind of think it worth keeping. Unless
that CSS bug is fixed, of course.

Beyond that, yes, it should be dead. And I feel dirty advocating for its
continued existence. My hands will never be clean again...


Out of curiosity, why is there no mention of HLink
<http://www.w3.org/TR/hlink/> in this draft in the section noting the debate
over XLink?


-- 
Joanne "Viqsi" Hunter <http://menagerie.tf/~jrhunter/>  Stop HTML Mail!
 Of course, I don't know how interesting any of this really is,      ()
 but now you've got it in your brain cells so you're stuck with it.  /\
      --Gary Larson                               ASCII Ribbon Campaign

Received on Friday, 13 December 2002 13:00:22 UTC