Re: opposite of em

Orion Adrian / 2004-04-02 20:12:

>>It might make more sense to just give em a strength attribute
>>which defaults to 1, but can be negative.
> 
> I've always liked this idea... mostly because it fixes the incongruity with 
> strong.  Now you just have one emphasis element that can represent any 
> amount of positive or negative emphasis.

I second this. Though the "strength" (or whatever the attribute is 
called) should definately be *relative*. That way you could copy and 
paste some markup in another context (which might already be of 
lesser importance and marked as such with negative emphasize) and it 
would just work.

The only problem is, how do you make relative strength to work with 
CSS? CSS couldn't add the "strength" values of all the element's 
ancestors, last time I checked.

If the styling issue cannot be (easily?) solved, the I think the 
best choice is to have de-emphasize element (deem or dem) and use 
nesting instead. What's the *real* use case that requires strong 
instead of a single em or some nested em's anyway?

I might even suggest recommending rendering negatively emphasized 
content as footnotes by default. Footnotes are something that's not 
important enough to mess with the flow but important enough to be 
mentioned -- sounds like negative emphasize for me.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 14:11:39 UTC