Re: Nested ems vs. strong (was: kelvSYC's Thoughts on the new XHTML Draft)

fantasai / 2003-05-09 12:56:

> kelvSYC wrote:
> 
>>strong Element:
>>It's semantically identical to the em element.  Remove it.
> 
> It's not identical. The emphasis is stronger in <strong>.

I think that strong has more emphasis only. As we can nest em 
elements, there's no need for strong.

For example, if you use style like

     em{font-style:italic}
     em em{font-style:normal}

to present emphasized text then the style is broken. Think about how 
you would read such text; you would emphasize the text and when the 
text rendered as normal inside emphasized text you'd emphasize it a 
bit more. Definately you wouldn't read that part as it would be a 
part of normal text. So, the issue that a piece of information with 
double emphasis looks like normal text is with the provided style only.

It seems to me that most of the people who want to keep strong also 
think it should be rendered as bold by default. However, that is 
purely presentational and I think all agree that both em and strong 
elements describe some kind of emphasis and strong gives more 
emphasis than em. On the other hand, there is no definition how much 
more emphasis strong gives. If I have two nested ems, is that still 
less emphasized than a single strong. How about three? How about a 
hundred?

It seems many people in this thread believe that three nested ems 
should be equal to the strong element we have today. I think two 
nested ems should be equal to the strong element, but I never liked 
styles that format double emphasis as normal text.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Monday, 12 May 2003 09:00:12 UTC