- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:31:52 +0300
- To: Patrick H.Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
- Cc: www-html@w3.org
On Apr 23, 2007, at 17:41, Patrick H. Lauke wrote: > Quoting Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>: > >> For *practical* purposes, <i> will continue to mean italics when >> applied to bicameral scripts on the visual media. > > And for *practical* reasons, tables are used for layout and <font> > is used to change typeface...but that doesn't mean it's right. In writing that uses the Latin script, italicization is more sticky than the typeface. Hence, italics are closer to being part of the content. > The argument puts the cart before the horse: <i> is used *because* > there is no "names of ships / animal genus / etc" element with a > default presentation of "italics". This does not validate its use > for those situations, but rather shows the pressing need for > elements that do clearly define those semantics and have that > particular presentation built into all browsers' default stylesheets. You seem to be assuming that semantic markup is good for the sake of semantics. I see semantic markup as merely a means to achieve media independence. The reality is that normal people don't want to encode the reason why they italicized something. They just want to select some text, hit ctrl-i or command-i and be done with it. My opinion about <i> is mostly documented in http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-January/ 009060.html -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 23 April 2007 15:32:32 UTC